Henry David Thoreau

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Being is the great explainer.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

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

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

Life gives nothing to man without labor.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.