Henry David Thoreau

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

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

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

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

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.

It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Resting at your shore fills me with a peace, as if I’ve always been here. My cells resonating with the element of you, boundaries diffuse as one.

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake.