"Nature is an admirable schoolmistress...." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

“Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render.”

“And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaininggross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?”

“Thou knowest, winter tames man, woman, and beast.”

“An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.”

“California is the only state in the union where you can fall asleep under a rose bush in full bloom and freeze to death.”

“Let us assume that entertainment is the sole end of reading; even so I think you would hold that no mental employment is so broadening to the sympathies or so enlightening to the understanding. Other pursuits belong not to all times, all ages, all conditions; but this gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure. Through the night-watches, on all our journeyings, and in our hours of ease, it is our unfailing companion.”

“The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.”

“Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”