Henry David Thoreau

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees. Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.

If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life … would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

To know fulfillment, nourish what is for the belly and not the eye.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

No two on earth in all things can agree. All have some daring singularity.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: “I’m with you kid. Let’s go.”

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’

I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.