Henry David Thoreau

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees. Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature – if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you – know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

The time has come to shed this skin. Its cloying inconvenience doesn’t fit me anymore. My new attire strikes color, shine, shadow, makes noise, and may put your teeth on edge. Tough sh–. Get used to it. I’m inviting you to step into your fear and dance with life.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

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

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected