Henry David Thoreau

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr.

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.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

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

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

My reputation grows with every failure.

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.