Henry David Thoreau

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…

The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being.

All personal achievement starts in the mind of the individual. Your personal achievement starts in your mind. The first step is to know exactly what your problem, goal or desire is.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.

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

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.