Henry David Thoreau

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

We must substitute courage for caution.

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

If you try to please everybody, somebody’s not going to like it.

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.