Henry David Thoreau

We falsely attribute to men a determined character, putting together all their yesterdays and averaging them, we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support, it is worse than a large family, he is the silent poor indeed.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.

If you try to please everybody, somebody’s not going to like it.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

The advantage of doing one’s praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.

Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.

It is better to be frightened now than killed hereafter

The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.