Henry David Thoreau

Things do not change; we change.

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

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

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. I did not wish to live what was not life… I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life… to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.

When you’ve told someone that you’ve left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.

There are charms made only for distant admiration.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

In the scenery of spring, nothing is better, nothing worse; the flowering branches are; some long, some short.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.