Henry David Thoreau

Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Remember where you came from.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

Language is the dress of thought.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.