Henry David Thoreau

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

How earthy old people become moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

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

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

Only trust theyself, and another shall noet betray thee

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.