Henry David Thoreau

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.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

The Public is merely a multiplied “me”.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of them the better.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.