Henry David Thoreau

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

Silence is not always tact, but it is tact that is golden, not silence.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.