Henry David Thoreau

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

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.