Henry David Thoreau

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

Try, try, try, and keep on trying is the rule that must be followed to become an expert in anything.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still; for age will not be defied.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Let us try what love will do.

His honest, patronizing pride in the good-will and respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more against a lower kind of folly.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

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