Walden

"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning."

"The only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a life as may enable you to do without these."

"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?"

"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life."

"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand."

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you have imagined."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."

"What men call good society and winning the world easily, I call the way to lose the soul."

"I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with success."

"The civilization of the body is an accomplished fact. But the civilization of the mind and heart remains to be done."

"All things are moral; and in their boundless changes rearrange themselves anew into an endless variety of combinations under the magical wheels and gravitational forces of nature."

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

"I wanted to live deliberately, to strip life down to its essentials."

"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated into insolence."

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see."

"Any man who takes himself too seriously is in danger, constant danger of losing his sense of proportion."

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

"I came into the world not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad."

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."

"No man ever followed his genius and lost."

"Many a man looks as worthy of suspicion as a hen that has been brooding a cuckoo's egg and is ready to fight all comers in defense of her treasure of a nest."

"I am convinced that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely."

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."

"How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened."

"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."

"The great majority of us are not looking for the truth; we're looking for a story that we prefer to any truth."