Henry David Thoreau

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make use and get advantage of her as I can, as is usual in such cases.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

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

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

It is a severe Rebuke upon us, that God makes us so many Allowances, and we make so few to our Neighbor: As if Charity had nothing to do with Religion; Or Love with Faith, that ought to work by it.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.