Henry David Thoreau

I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

What is once well done is done forever.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

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

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I’ve learned that from my husband, that sort of, you know, ability to not get too high or too low with changes and bumps in the road.

A hen is only a egg’s way of making another egg.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

He is great who confers the most benefits.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.