Henry David Thoreau

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.

Things do not change; we change.

The only prudence in life is concentration.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

The billiard table is better than the doctor.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Never be bored, and you will never be boring.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.