Things do not change; we change.
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.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives...
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perh...
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.
that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings, — The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that any body knows
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but ac...
The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
