Henry David Thoreau

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

We’re so infatuated with studying labels that we forget to read between the lines of one another.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.

Man is not weak; knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

All mankind love a lover.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.