Henry David Thoreau

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Associate reverently, as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

I could not find the world if I searched ten years. I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

For so many people, TV and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them. It becomes important for the world to see different images of each other, so that we can develop empathy and understanding.

Live, let live, and help live

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

A woman is a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

It is the nature of babies to be in bliss.