Henry David Thoreau

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

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.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

There is no remedy for love, but to love more.

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Dharma is what the Buddha taught. It is the way of understanding and love-how to understand, how to love, how to make understanding and love into real things.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is to prepare for the long haul, the rise and fall, and let neither define your sense of self.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is – Let there be truth between us two forevermore.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Most people want to avoid pain, and discipline is usually painful.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It’s very important to be aware of them every time they come up.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.