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. . . .

one cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind.

What is the use of a house, if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

"I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour."

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. 

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. 

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?