Henry David Thoreau

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, the impression of inward comfort and Sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature’s English comfort.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.

He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

Every mind has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

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

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?