Henry David Thoreau

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.

There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.

There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

He that has more knowledge than judgment, is made for another man’s use more than his own.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.