Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

He who parades his virtues seldom leads the parade. He who puts up with insult invites injury. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present.

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

The highest condition of art is artlessness.

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery.