Henry David Thoreau

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

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

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

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.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

You are braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And smarter than you think.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

We don’t want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

The most dangerous people are those who have passion but lack wisdom.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.