Henry David Thoreau

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

God is better served in resisting a Temptation to Evil, than in many formal Prayers.

In the long run you hit only what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.

Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem!

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

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.