Henry David Thoreau

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

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.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

We have a problem. Congratulations. But it’s a tough problem. Then double congratulations.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

Events tend to recur in cycles…

I think that age is irrelevant. We’re all pretty much spiritual beings – I consider myself to be about eighty-five. I feel like I’m ancient, like two thousand years old.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.