Henry David Thoreau

How earthy old people become moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

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

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.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life… I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life… to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

People only see what they are prepared to see.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.

I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.

The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.

That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.

Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete.