Henry David Thoreau

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one… characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change thing I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice…

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

If thou art clean and warm, it is sufficient; for more doth but rob the Poor, and please the Wanton.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

When one wanted one’s interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.