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.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.

Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.

When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature . . . no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.