Henry David Thoreau

I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make use and get advantage of her as I can, as is usual in such cases.

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.

All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

It is easy – terribly easy – to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

You know you’re a success when you look at your kids and realize they turned out better than you.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

A home without a cat-and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat-may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.