Henry David Thoreau

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must lay it down and commence living on its hint… What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.

A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

Right is right even if everyone is against it and wrong is wrong even if everyone is for it.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

If you can’t forgive and forget, pick one.

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

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.