Henry David Thoreau

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.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

I have never found a 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.

What is once well done is done forever.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

A woman is a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Sad people dislike the happy, and the happy the sad; the quick thinking the sedate, and the careless the busy and industrious.

It’s your life-but only if you make it so.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.