“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”

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.

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.

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.

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

Whether this happens because they stay so long and attend their work so diligently that they forget the faces and persons, which they first sat down with, or whatever it is, they seldom rise from the toilet the same woman they appeared when they began to dress

I came then to a conviction that has never left me: that there is too much for me to attend to in this mortal life without overspeculation on the immortal, that it is not necessary to my peace of mind or to my effort to be a decent and useful person, to have a definite assurance about the affairs of the next world.

I don’t really get to attend church. That’s definitely one of the challenges.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.

Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.