Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Grow wild according to thy nature ... Enjoy the land but own it not ..

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines.

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.

If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him ... he will be surrounded by grandeur.

Love your life, poor as it is.

Who looks in the sun will see no light else; but also he will see no shadow. Our life revolves unceasingly, but the centre is ever the same, and the wise will regard only the seasons of the soul.

What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us.

The question is not what you look at but how you look and whether you see.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

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.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Let go of the past and go for the future. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagined.

The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.

Action from principle — the perception and the performance of right — changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was.

Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you?

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.