Henry David Thoreau

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

People ignore the thing they have the most power over. I know so many people who will go to a protest and do something big on an issue. But they won’t deal with that issue in their home.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

It is all right to rat, but you can’t re-rat.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.