Henry David Thoreau

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

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

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

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Above all, we must avoid the pitfalls of tribalism. If we are divided among ourselves on tribal lines, we open our doors to foreign intervention and its potentially harmful consequences.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

A shoe that is too large is apt to trip one, and when too small, to pinch the feet. So it is with those whose fortune does not suit them.

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.