Henry David Thoreau

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

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.

It’s not the adversity, but how you face it.

We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it as not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

You will know (the good from the bad) when you are calm, at peace. Passive.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within and available to you now.

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.

Ask counsel of both timesof the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.