Henry David Thoreau

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Wherever you are, be there totally.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.