Is there any conflict between science and religion? There is no conflict in the mind of God, but often there is conflict in the minds of men.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life. It is never isolated, or simply added as treasure to our stock. When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, - and then we can hardly see anything else.

Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream-world into a reality.

As for clothing, [...] perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. [...] 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.