Henry David Thoreau

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

If there’s only one answer, then this must not be a very interesting topic.

Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.

It takes an enemy and a friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart. The one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

Life can’t be all that bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.

In the meantime, let’s agree that what makes a problem big is simply that it’s yours.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

You are so much more than what people have done to you, and to let that define you, would be a tragedy.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

No matter how carefully and assiduously and how deeply you bury shit, the American public will find it and buy it in large quantity, It’s true, absolutely true.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.