Henry David Thoreau

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonal experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.

I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

I always feel excited when I can do something that’s about what I believe in.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

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

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Not even the Devil can call a woman “Slut” if he is not able to make her fall in love.

There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.

Amuse not thy self therefore with the numerous Opinions of the World, nor value thy self upon verbal Orthodoxy, Philosophy, or thy Skill in Tongues, or Knowledge of the Fathers; (too much the Business and Vanity of the World). But in this rejoyce, That thou knowest God, that is the Lord, who exerciseth loving Kindness, and Judgment; and Righteousness in the Earth.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.