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.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

Men have become the tools of their tools.

What is once well done is done forever.

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.