Henry David Thoreau

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God’s message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper – and despise it.

I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.