Henry David Thoreau

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature – if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you – know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgment.

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

Necessity does everything well.

He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.

Energy doesn’t lie so trust those vibes you’re getting.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Kings are not born they are made by universal hallucination.

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.