Henry David Thoreau

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.