Henry David Thoreau

Pity the man who has a character to support – it is worse than a large family – he is silent poor indeed.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

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

A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.

There is a crack in everything God has made.

Passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Pale death with an impartial foot knocks at the hovels of the poor and the palaces of king.

Clogged with yesterday’s excess, the body drags the mind down with it.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.