Henry David Thoreau

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.