Henry David Thoreau

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

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.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.

I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore.

Life is a progress, and not a station.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

In the end, people will judge you anyway, so don’t live our life impressing other – live your life impressing yourself.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

One night awaits all, and death’s path must be trodden once and for all.

All mankind love a lover.