Henry David Thoreau

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

The world is its own magic.

The intuitive recognition of the instant, thus reality… is the highest act of wisdom.

The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure –tangible material prosperity in this world -is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.

The memory of a day like today reminds me to hold the ones I love that much tighter, that much longer… Take that much more time to be present and to feel the blessing of another day…

Responsibility is the price of greatness.

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.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it… Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.