I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.

It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination

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.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

The strongest wind cannot stagger a Spirit; it is a Spirit's breath. A just man's purpose cannot be split on any Grampus or material rock, but itself will split rocks till it succeeds.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.