Henry David Thoreau

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

That government is best which governs least.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

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.

Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

As Love ought to bring them together, so it is the best Way to keep them well together.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

You bring out the be(a)st in me. Polarized tension, a raw slash of claw, swathed softly in love. A peace of my mind in tumultuous chaotic razor-sharp clarity, impulsive wit to wisdom, mixing addictive shots of cocktail emotions in a full-spectrum experience.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.