A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

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

Life in us is like the water in a river.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

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

I see less difference between a city and a swamp than formerly.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.