Henry David Thoreau

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

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

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

The person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn’t likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Be better. Be better at everything. Be better fathers… Men can be better husbands, which is – be a part of your family’s life. Do the dishes. Don’t babysit your children. You don’t babysit your own children. Be engaged. Don’t just think going to work and coming home makes you a man. Being a father, being engaged, all that stuff is important. Be a better employer. When you are sitting at a seat of power at a table of any kind and you look around you just see you, it’s just you and a bunch of men around a table, on a golf course, making deals, and you allow that to happen, and you’re okay with that – be better.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Standing beneath this immense, bejeweled, star-spangled dome, breathing in its life, boundaries fall away, possibilities open up and my wings unfold. And I thought that you were the one who was the angel.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Nothing is real.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.