Henry David Thoreau

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then in middle age they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

So different are the colors of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.

You. too, can determine what you want. You can decide on your major objectives, targets, aims, and destination.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.

I shall strike the stars with my unlifted head.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

None of us should be defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done.

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.