As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.

I realized a school doesn't need a School Committee or Trustees or Governors or lumber or approved textbooks. All a school needs is a mind that sends and minds that receive. I shall teach my own students how to teach themselves. My own school. No buildings. Break out of the classroom prison. All I need is SKY. The Universe can be my classroom - the great vast world of the Concord countryside.

By what a delicate and far-stretched contribution every island is made! What an enterprise of nature thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry.

Good deeds are no less good because their object is unworthy.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.