Henry David Thoreau

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

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.

Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

The hottest love has the coldest end.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

The quickest way to become troubled is to be concerned with what people are gonna say about your life and your work.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

We are prisoners of ideas.