Henry David Thoreau

The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

You don’t get respect if you don’t deserve it

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

Necessity does everything well.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions…

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

Think with your whole body.

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

Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.