Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.

I suspect it was...the old story of the implacable necessity of a man having honour within his own natural spirit.  A man cannot live and temper his mettle without such honour.  There is deep in him a sense of the heroic quest; and our modern way of life, with its emphasis on security, its distrust of the unknown and its elevation of abstract collective values has repressed the heroic impulse to a degree that may produce the most dangerous consequences.

Freedom from something is not freedom.

For me, there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart.  There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length.  And there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

I am not at all interested in immortality, only in the taste of tea.

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.