Henry David Thoreau

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

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

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country. You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can’t ever rub it off him.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

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.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.