Henry David Thoreau

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must lay it down and commence living on its hint… What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

Our best thoughts come from others.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That’s all there ever is.

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.

He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

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