Henry David Thoreau

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est (Knowledge Itself Is Power)

If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all. [Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur.]

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me.