Henry David Thoreau

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

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.

Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.