Henry David Thoreau

Men have become the tools of their trade.

I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make use and get advantage of her as I can, as is usual in such cases.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right.

Your fingers caress my heart strings, shaping a silent sonnet in notes of love. Transcending space and time, bathing the ether in perfect harmony.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Standing beneath this immense, bejeweled, star-spangled dome, breathing in its life, boundaries fall away, possibilities open up and my wings unfold. And I thought that you were the one who was the angel.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

The gap that’s opened I’m filling with fairy dust, hues of the heart and a joy for life what was… I invite to exit right quietly, in shades of black and white.

He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.

Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.