Henry David Thoreau

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

He who would begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

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

Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.