Henry David Thoreau

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it’s about the stories; it’s about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people’s privacy.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Why not blame the libraries? They’re full of violent books.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it. – Vronksy (Anna Karenina)

Classic – A book which people praise and don’t read.