Henry David Thoreau

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

Friends… they cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams.

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

If you can’t forgive and forget, pick one.

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.

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

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.

If you are good, life is good.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.