Henry David Thoreau

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

What is once well done is done forever.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

If thou rise with an Appetite, thou art sure never to sit down without one.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear.