Henry David Thoreau

Associate reverently, as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

Man is not weak; knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Poverty is often concealed in splendor, and often in extravagance. It is the task of many people to conceal their neediness from others. Consequently they support themselves by temporary means, and everyday is lost in contriving for tomorrow.

Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

My emancipation don’t fit your equation.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.