Henry David Thoreau

In the long run you hit only what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare. While he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

For Wealth are all things that conduce, to one’s destruction or their use. A standard both to buy and sell, all things from heaven down to hell.

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.

He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.