Henry David Thoreau

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good;be good for something.All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men and brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,

I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance! it depends on how you are yarded.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

What’s the point of having great knowledge and keeping them all to yourself?

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

Count on it, if a person talks of their misfortune, there is something in it that is not disagreeable to them.

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.