Henry David Thoreau

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

Poverty is often concealed in splendor, and often in extravagance. It is the task of many people to conceal their neediness from others. Consequently they support themselves by temporary means, and everyday is lost in contriving for tomorrow.

Blame is safer than praise.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

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

The self divides into ten billion distinct illuminating spirits. Distinguish these without falling into names and classifications.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.