To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?
Every blade in the field – Every leaf in the forest – lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.