Henry David Thoreau

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

People who use time wisely spend it on activities that advance their overall purpose in life.

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.

All say, How hard it is that we have to die – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

Logic is like the sword

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gongthese are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

How hard you work matters more than how much you make.

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

You get a reputation for stability if you are stable for years.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.