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.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

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

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

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

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

If you want the time to pass quickly, just give your note for 90 days.

Shallow people believe in luck and in circumstances; Strong people believe in cause and effect.

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

The billiard table is better than the doctor.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Patience and diligence, like faith, remove mountains.

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

He gains everyone’s approval who mixes the pleasant with the useful.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.