Henry David Thoreau

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

Count on it, if a person talks of their misfortune, there is something in it that is not disagreeable to them.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.