Henry David Thoreau

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.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

There is in the act of preparing, the moment you start caring.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.

Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.