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.

What a pity if we do not live this short time according to the laws of the long time,--the eternal laws!

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth.

So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

We saw men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.