Henry David Thoreau

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental and trifling advantages of Friendship, as that the Friend can assist in time of need by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel. Even the utmost goodwill and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

For so many people, TV and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them. It becomes important for the world to see different images of each other, so that we can develop empathy and understanding.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

Today is a king in disguise.