If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.

To be right is more honorable than to be law abiding.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.