Henry David Thoreau

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

It is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.

Bravery is more important than perfection.- Kanye West

What you do today can improve all your tomorrows.

Only trust theyself, and another shall noet betray thee

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

If it be an evil to judge rashly or untruly any single man, how much a greater sin it is to condemn a whole people.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.