Henry David Thoreau

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.

Humility like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.

Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.

He looks the whole world in the face for he owes not any man.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.