The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

At least let us have healthy books.

I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline.