Do what you know you ought to do. Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor's advice? There is a nearerneighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.