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.

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.

Freedom from something is not freedom.

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.

I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.

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.