Henry David Thoreau

Men have become the tools of their trade.

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.

At the end of the day, life is about being happy being who you are.

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

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Strivers achieve what dreamers believe.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.