Henry David Thoreau

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

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

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees. Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

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.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

To be a man’s own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody’s.

Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

The English never draw a line without blurring it.

For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

Fortune makes a fool of those she favors too much.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.