Henry David Thoreau

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

If you live for people’s acceptance, you’ll die from their rejections.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Stay with me,’ he said, ‘until the sun goes out, the seas are parched, and the wind draws its last breath.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.