Henry David Thoreau

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

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

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand — relax!

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

Danger – if you meet it promptly and without flinching – you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

We mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

Responsibility is the price of greatness.

The city is recruited from the country.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

The avarice person is ever in want; let your desired aim have a fixed limit.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.