Henry David Thoreau

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

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.

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

You must learn to drink the cup of life as it comes … without stirring it up from the bottom. That’s where the bitter dregs are!

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

If there be three distinct and separate Persons, then three distinct and separate Substances. . . . And since the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God . . . then unless the Father, Son and Spirit are three distinct Nothings, they must be three distinct Substances, and consequently three distinct Gods.

To be great is to be misunderstood.