In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith.

An empire is an immense egotism.

I honor health as the first Muse.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.

We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves.

there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.