Henry David Thoreau

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees. Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity.

All styles are good except the tiresome kind.

We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.