Henry David Thoreau

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must lay it down and commence living on its hint… What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

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.

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought – with these I deal.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

For Wealth are all things that conduce, to one’s destruction or their use. A standard both to buy and sell, all things from heaven down to hell.

We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

Standing on the doorstep of desire, I hold this bouquet like a gun and these vows like a petition for the death penalty.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

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

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.