Henry David Thoreau

I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

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

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

There is no remedy for love than to love more.

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

We don’t want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.