Henry David Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

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

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

How can one be well…when one suffers morally?

If there be three distinct and separate Persons, then three distinct and separate Substances. . . . And since the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God . . . then unless the Father, Son and Spirit are three distinct Nothings, they must be three distinct Substances, and consequently three distinct Gods.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.