284 quotes
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
Life Without Principle (1863)
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Walden (1854)
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Life Without Principle (1863)
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Journals (1838)
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves.
Journals (1838)
There is absolutely no common sense; it is common nonsense.
You must get your living by loving.
Life Without Principle (1863)
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence.
Life Without Principle (1863)
Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.
There is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
Walden (1854)
The savage in man is never quite eradicated.
Journals (1838)
They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation.
Life Without Principle (1863)
Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.
A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.
Journals (1838)
What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.
Life Without Principle (1863)