Henry David Thoreau

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.

You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself into one.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees. Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

Every other enjoyment malice may destroy; every other panegyric envy may withhold; but no human power can deprive the boaster of his own encomiums.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Danger – if you meet it promptly and without flinching – you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.