Henry David Thoreau

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I’m sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

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

How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice…

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

Those who trust us educate us.

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

I teach that all men are mad.

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.