Henry David Thoreau

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Events tend to recur in cycles.

So different are the colors of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.

Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

You can tell a lot about a person by listening to the way they talk about someone they once loved.

There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.

All I want to do is change the world.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.