Henry David Thoreau

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

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

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

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

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.

All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.