Henry David Thoreau

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

We should come home from adventures and perils and discoveries with new experiences and character.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

It is your business when the wall next door catches fire.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

I want someone with the proven strength to persevere, someone who knows this job and takes it seriously, someone who understands that the issues a president faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

Stupidity is something you can only partly save people from.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.