Henry David Thoreau

If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonal experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.

The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.

Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

You can tell a lot about a person by listening to the way they talk about someone they once loved.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. In time, you are made to realize that the kindness done you is become a curse and you wish it had not happened.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Where God does not govern, tyrants will rule.

Dare to think for yourself.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

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

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.