Henry David Thoreau

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonal experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

Sir, a man may be so much of everything, that he is nothing of anything.

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Do what good thou canst unknown, and be not vain of what ought rather to be felt than seen.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence – neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.