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

“The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.”

“The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in the Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

“Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.”

“The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.”

“Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.”

“The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.”