Henry David Thoreau

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love.

What is once well done is done forever.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

How can they expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed time of character.

Only trust thyself, and another shall not betray thee.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

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.

Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another’s air with another’s breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.

Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

A vow is a snare for sin.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.