Henry David Thoreau

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

To inherit property is not to be born – it is to be still-born, rather.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

The first wealth is health.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

We’re so infatuated with studying labels that we forget to read between the lines of one another.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.