Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

We humans for millions of years were nomadic. We associated freedom and well-being with the ability to move into open spaces, to find places more suited to hunting.

It is better to live under a tree in a jungle inhabited by tigers and elephants, to maintain oneself in such a place with ripe fruits and spring water, to lie down on grass and to wear the ragged barks of trees than to live amongst one's relations when reduced to poverty.

Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal... I've decided that I'm going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.

You need a good gardener and a good fisherman. The cook is not required.

Real freedom is having nothing. I was freer when I didn't have a cent.

I do have a side of me that would just love to be stuck in the woods and have to stick it out and be really resourceful.

My goal isn't to make money, it's to try and survive and make a point.

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

One time, I took a woman on a deserted island, and we lived like Mother Nature for 10 days.

Yeah, I like going away for camp. It brings out the savagery.

God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little ... The trade unions, under the European system, destroy liberty ... I do not mean to say that a dollar a day is enough to support a workingman ... not enough to support a man and five children if he insists on smoking and drinking beer. But the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live! A family may live on good bread and water in the morning, water and bread at midday, and good bread and water at night!

There's something about living in the country that I think makes you inventive, because nature is full of miracles and wonder and surprises, and if you don't have much money, you have to make things if you want things.

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush with the stars to see, Bread I dip in the river There's the life for a man like me, There's the life for ever.

This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.

Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain, And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.

Equality is a mortuary word.

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?

He [Martin Luther King Jr.] always used to say you have no choice about being born or dying. The only thing you have a choice about is what you die for.

My father's nature turned out no waste product; he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He took his own happiness with him.

No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars - bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.

In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.