Henry David Thoreau

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.

What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.

Patience – the gift of being able to see past the emotion.

One can resist the invasion of an army, but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

I believe in the limitlessness of humans. We’re capable of incredible things. At times that realization is frightening.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God; and to do that, thou must be ruled by him who has given to kings his grace to command themselves and their subjects, and to the people the grace to obey God and their kings.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.