Henry David Thoreau

What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

The more experiments you make the better.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Life gives nothing to man without labor.

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.