I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.

To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food.

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.

Every man looks upon his wood pile with a sort of affection.

Renew thyself completely each day.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.

I stopped short in the path today to admire how the trees grow up without forethought regardless of the time and circumstances. They do not wait as men do—now is the golden age of the sapling—Earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough—.

What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?