I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.

When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveler's, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveler. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveler passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.

Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.

For in the wood these golden days Some leaf obeys its Maker's call. And through their hollow aisles it plays With delicate touch the prelude of the Fall.

Every man should stand for a force which is perfectly irresistible.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.