Henry David Thoreau

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.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

America is another name for opportunity.

Pity is for living, envy is for dead.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Sexes make no Difference; since in Souls there is none: And they are the Subjects of Friendship.

I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

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

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.