Henry David Thoreau

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. In time, you are made to realize that the kindness done you is become a curse and you wish it had not happened.

Your mind will enchain you. Your heart will set you free.

I am a sky gazer. The sky, it pulls at me. Its amazing eternal expanse of breathtaking beauty calls me back to my senses, stretches my awareness, soothes my eyes, opens my heart, stills me. I feel a soft soul longing to be up there, in the vastness, amongst the clouds that are alive and billow and skud and glow; metamorphosing from perfection into perfection. A constantly changing canvas brushed by magic.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.

For disappointments, that come not by our own folly, they are the trials or corrections of Heaven: and it is our own fault, if they prove not our advantage.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.