Henry David Thoreau

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.