Henry David Thoreau

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

When you know better, you do better.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Pale death with an impartial foot knocks at the hovels of the poor and the palaces of king.

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.