Henry David Thoreau

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

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

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

Our best history is still poetry.

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

Any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the law rules, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?