I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Leaders must understand that some people will inevitably sell out to the evil side. Don't waste your time wondering why; spend your time discovering who.

Wonder is the mother of all science.

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owning more to patient attention, than to any other talent.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Man is a universe in little.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.

I had long since taught myself to follow the inner voice. I delighted in submitting to it. To act against it would be difficult and painful to me.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.