If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love.

If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."