Henry David Thoreau

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

This American government – what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

It is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.