Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

Your religion is where your love is.

If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

It is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world, which the humblest man has not faculties to surmount.

For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?

The Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots.

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.