The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears to hear it.

Be not merely good. Be good for something.

The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.

Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop; truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest.

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined...

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value;they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.