Henry David Thoreau

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

The one who cannot restrain their anger will wish undone, what their temper and irritation prompted them to do.

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

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Suspicions that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; but suspicions that are artificially nourished and put into men’s heads by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.