Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators.—Walden
On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
One sensible act will be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.—Journal, 26 June 1852
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.—Walden
Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master's chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848
That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.—Journal, 22 June 1839
The bigoted and sectarian forget that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished.—Journal, 27 July 1852
The farmer increases the extent of habitable earth. He makes soil. That is an honorable occupation.—Journal, 2 March 1852
The mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but thank Heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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