Henry David Thoreau

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

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

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Most people want to avoid pain, and discipline is usually painful.

His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is, usually, deeper and more beautiful than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

Necessity does everything well.

I want someone with the proven strength to persevere, someone who knows this job and takes it seriously, someone who understands that the issues a president faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.