quotes from classic

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and un...

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We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

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Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie; and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it.

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It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and...

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We have got to know what both life and death are, before we can begin to live after our own fashion. Let us be learning our a-b- c's as soon a...

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The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, b...

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Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

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America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense th...

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Rabelais, for instance, is intolerable; one chapter is better than a volume,—it may be sport to him, but it is death to us. A mere humorist,...

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We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

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There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up...

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On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it ...

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All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

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The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, such cheer, they affor...

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Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.

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As for Waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. Do not the flowers die every autumn? He...

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Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground?

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The Eastern steamboat passed us with music and a cheer, as if they were going to a ball, when they might be going to—Davy's locker.

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Life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting.... We have not got half-way to dawn yet.

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You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten eart...

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