Henry David Thoreau

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

I was born upon thy bank, river, my blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever. At the bottom of my dream.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

Let your family, staff, and friends know that you’re still the same person, despite all the publicity and notoriety that accompanies your position.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Be ever on your guard what you say of anybody and to whom.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.