“I am too high born to be propertied, To be a second at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

“I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.”

“Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state...”

“Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly.”

“I cannot come nearer to God and HeavenThan I live to Walden even.I am its stony shore,And the breeze that passes o'er;In the hollow of my handAre its water and its sand,And its deepest resortLies high in my thought.”

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

“The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.”