Henry David Thoreau

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself into one.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

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

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.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.

Strange – is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it as not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.