A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

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

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

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.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?