Henry David Thoreau

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.