Henry David Thoreau

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

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.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life … would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

Well, when it comes to social media – there are just times I turn off the world, you know. There are just some times you have to give yourself space to be quiet, which means you’ve got to set those phones down. You can’t be reading all that stuff. I mean, that’s like letting somebody just walk up and slap you, you know? You would never do that. You would never just sit there and go, slap me in the face and I’m good with it. No. So why would you open yourself up to that?

We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make… that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.

How many are the things I can do without!

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

Tear thyself from delay.

Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.

Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Every wall is a door.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.