Henry David Thoreau

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

Fidelity has enfranchised slaves, and adopted servants to be sons.

Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker upon the planet. Then all things are at risk.

Coercion is evil precisely because it…eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

The gap that’s opened I’m filling with fairy dust, hues of the heart and a joy for life what was… I invite to exit right quietly, in shades of black and white.

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

He took off his hat and shook it (having hurried home as though his own coronation were waiting), and moved now with the slow deliberation of lonely people who have time for every meager requirement of their lives.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

Take away the danger and remove the restraint, and wayward nature runs free.