Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined...

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.

The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

Whatever your life's pursuit -- art, poetry, sculpture, music, whatever your occupation may be -- you can be as spiritual as clergy, always living a life of praise.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?

[T]he German censorship forbade or mutilated my every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul.

We know too much for one man to know too much.

After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier spiced with expensive names.

The power to bring me out of solitude - or to push me back into it - had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.

There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.

I want to do small things, for small people, and to make the small people big.

Don't worry about getting final cut, worry about making the best possible cut.