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.

In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.

I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,--if ten honest men only,--ay, if one HONESTman, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.