Henry David Thoreau

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

For so many people, TV and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them. It becomes important for the world to see different images of each other, so that we can develop empathy and understanding.

Without passion, you don’t have energy. Without energy, you have nothing.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

Blame is safer than praise.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Children are all foreigners.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.