Henry David Thoreau

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love.

I was born upon thy bank, river, my blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever. At the bottom of my dream.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.

No one ever became great by imitation.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.