Henry David Thoreau

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God; and to do that, thou must be ruled by him who has given to kings his grace to command themselves and their subjects, and to the people the grace to obey God and their kings.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

If you live for people’s acceptance, you’ll die from their rejections.

The foolish are like ripples on water, For whatsoever they do is quickly effaced; But the righteous are like carvings upon stone, For their smallest act is durable.

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

Don’t do or say things you would not like to see on the front page of The Washington Post.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.