Henry David Thoreau

There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

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

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

The rain comes and what bends will rise. It is a purposeful journey.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

He who is upright in his way of life and free from sin.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

If you can’t forgive and forget, pick one.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.