Henry David Thoreau

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

The time has come to shed this skin. Its cloying inconvenience doesn’t fit me anymore. My new attire strikes color, shine, shadow, makes noise, and may put your teeth on edge. Tough sh–. Get used to it. I’m inviting you to step into your fear and dance with life.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

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

The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won’t sit upon a cold stove lid, either.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.