Henry David Thoreau

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

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Virtue is too often merely local.