Henry David Thoreau

“We live a short period of time in this world, but we live it according to the laws of eternal life.”

“...for my greatest skill has been to want but little.”

“Under a goverment which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison”

“Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.”

“It is never too late to give up your prejudices”

“A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.”

“My purpose in going to Walden Pondwas not to live cheaply nor to live dearly therebut to transact some private business,with the fewest obstacles…It's a good place for business...it offers advantageswhich it may not be good policy to divulge.”

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.”

“An unclean person is universally a slothful one.”

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

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

“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.”

“let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.”

“I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”

“Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”

“I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.”

“That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. ”

“The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.”

“I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or abean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonelythan the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the southwind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a newhouse.”

“If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”

“But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.”

“I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”

“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed hasbeen, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seedthere, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

“Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

“The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.”

“If I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.”

“For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once done well is done forever.”

“If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”

“Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”

“No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth.”

“Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.”

“The universe is wider than our views of it.”

“Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.”

“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.”

“The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.”

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”

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

“By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down.”

“As if there were safety in stupidity alone.”

“The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated.”

“Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”

“With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.”

“God is alone,-but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion.”

“Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.”