Henry David Thoreau

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while… you don’t do things right once in a while… you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

A picture is a poem without words.

The third component of the Law of Dharma is service to humanity–to serve your fellow human beings and to ask yourself the questions,How can I help? How can I help all those that I come into contact with? When you combine the ability to express your unique talent with service to humanity, then you make full use of the Law of Dharma.

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.

Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

Necessity does everything well.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.