Henry David Thoreau

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

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.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

I heartily accept the motto,That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

We don’t want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.