Henry David Thoreau

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees. Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sun beams and you will always look lovely!

Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.

It is the nature of babies to be in bliss.

I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

Mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.