From Walden:

“We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aim must still be the same, and our means essentially the same.”

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

“I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.”

“Nothing can deter the poet, for he is actuated by pure love”

“There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still.”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”