Henry David Thoreau

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

The sun is but a morning star.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

He is armed without who is innocent within, be this thy screen, and this thy wall of brass.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.