Henry David Thoreau

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

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

The reward of one’s duty is the power to fulfill another.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

Standing on the doorstep of desire, I hold this bouquet like a gun and these vows like a petition for the death penalty.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.