Henry David Thoreau

The universe is wider than our views of it.

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.