It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

For the most part, the best man's spirit makes a fearful sprite to haunt his grave.

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.

The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.

Our last deed, like the young of the land crab, wends its way to the sea of cause and effect as soon as born, and makes a drop there to eternity.