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1. How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
2. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
3. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
4. Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.
5. If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
6. Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.
7. It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
8. It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
9. It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
10. Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
11. It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
12. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
13. The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
14. Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
15. What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
16. There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
17. I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
18. If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.
19. Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
20. You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.