The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been tr… - Henry David Thoreau

You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blundering clodhopper that I am.

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.