Henry David Thoreau

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one… characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

Standing on the doorstep of desire, I hold this bouquet like a gun and these vows like a petition for the death penalty.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.