Henry David Thoreau

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

He is a modest little man who has a good deal to be modest about.

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

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

Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity does best discover vice, but adversity does best discover virtue.

I hate the irreverent rabble and keep them far from me.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.