Henry David Thoreau

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can’t dishearten it.

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.

The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits not because recompense is a pleasure for them, but because obligation is a pain.

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.