"The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly."
"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."
"...and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because the preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof."
"What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deed for old people, and new deeds for new."
"Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost."
"Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me."
"By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin?"
"According to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs."
"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor."
"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to tis dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
"Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?"
"Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience."
"All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be."
"Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind."
"We worship not the Graces, nor the Pacae, but Fashion.... The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same."
"It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people."
"In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun."
"The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.... The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures."
"Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made."
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
