Methinks that the moment my legs began to move, my thoughts began to flow.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.

It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.