Henry David Thoreau

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

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature – if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you – know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.