Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life?

The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.

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.

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.

They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures and makeshifts merely. They put off the day of settlement, and meanwhile the debt accumulates.

Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.