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

I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in it’s gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Write while the heat is in you.

The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.

Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

We are constantly invited to be what we are.

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.

I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.

The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character.

There’s an army story in me, and I think there’s a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I never stepped foot into a Brooks Brothers before Mad Men.