Henry David Thoreau

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

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

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Let us try what love will do.

We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Live, let live, and help live

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

For every why he had a wherefore.