Henry David Thoreau

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

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

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature – if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you – know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

The public must and will be served.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.