“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

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.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

It is never too late to give up your prejudices.

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

… my convictions led me to adhere to the sufficiency of the light within us, resting on truth as authority, rather than ‘taking authority for truth.’

Once I realized that the only thing I can actually control in this life is my own mind, how I choose to react, feel, and perceive, I felt immediately liberated.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

When it comes to educating all of us about the most basic things in life, it seems to me we need more kindergartens and fewer graduate schools.

Oh, the secret life of man and woman–dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let’s think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence – and just as adventurous.