Henry David Thoreau

The only wealth is life.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

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

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times. You don’t mind the times … You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don’t think foolishly.

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.