Henry David Thoreau

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

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.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

Never marry but for love; but see that thou lovest what is lovely.

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.