Henry David Thoreau

“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”

“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.”

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

“We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.”

“A man can suffocate on courtesy.”

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

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

“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.”

“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”

“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.”

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

“Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made”

“Men have become the tools of their tools.”

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

“The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.”

“Do not engage to find things as you think they are.”

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

“No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.”

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”

“I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”

“The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.”

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”

“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

“One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”

“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”

“How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.”

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

“Any fool can make a ruleAnd any fool will mind it.”

“He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.”

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

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”

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

“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

“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.”

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

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

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

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in”

“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 am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together.”

“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”