There is no law so strong which a little gladness may not transgress. Pile up your books, the records of sadness, your saws and your laws. Nature is glad outside, and her merry worms within will ere long topple them down.—Journal, 3 January 1853
There is something sublime in the fact that some of the oldest written sentences should thus celebrate the coming in of spring.—Journal,  9 July 1852
This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.—Walden
Though I write every day yet when I say a good thing, it seems as it I wrote but rarely.—Journal, 28 February 1841
Though the speech of the poet goes to the heart of things, yet he is that one especially who speaks civilly to Nature as a second person and in some sense is the patron of the world.—Journal, 30 November 1841
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.—Walden 
Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.—Journal, 11 November 1851
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate . . . As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.—Walden
We could get no further into the Aeneid than—atque altae moenia Romae,—and the wall of high Rome, before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of genius has to be tried; that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years off, should have to unfold his meaning, the inspiration of Italian vales, to the pilgrim on New England hills.—"A Walk to Wachusett"
We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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