Henry David Thoreau

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

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.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.

A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

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

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

If you are going through hell, keep going.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

There is still vitality under the winter snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.

A vow is a snare for sin.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.