Henry David Thoreau

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

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance! it depends on how you are yarded.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

He that does good for good’s sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly. The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.

I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which ‘The Recognitions’ ’ debt to ‘Ulysses’ was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read ‘Ulysses.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.

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

Any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the law rules, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.