Henry David Thoreau

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.

I was born upon thy bank, river, my blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever. At the bottom of my dream.

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.

Surrender is faith that the power of love can accomplish anything… even when you can not foresee the outcome.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

Justice though moving with tardy pace, has seldom failed to overtake the wicked in their flight.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.