Henry David Thoreau

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

The stars are the apexes of what triangles!

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Men have become the tools of their trade.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.

He hates chess. He says it is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something clever when they are only wasting their time.

I wish for you the wisdom to realize that forgiveness has nothing to do with an apology.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

It’s the ones that stayed after the Exodus, that I knew were real and could handle the truth; that would stay with me on my journey, for better or worse.

Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.