Henry David Thoreau

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

The cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free man acknowledges. It is the only security that free man desires.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.

Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.

The dice of God are always loaded.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.

Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.

An honest man is always a child.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.