Henry David Thoreau

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

An honest man is always a child.

I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.

People who use time wisely spend it on activities that advance their overall purpose in life.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption –pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.

Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.