Henry David Thoreau

After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

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.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

What you do makes a difference. And you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

No man was ever great by imitation.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

If matters go badly now, they will not always be so.

Truth is the summit of being justice is the application of it to affairs.

The more you know, the less you need.

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.