Henry David Thoreau

Being is the great explainer.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

And all the while I thought I was drowning, I was actually the one holding my head under the water.

It always seems impossible until its done.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn’t something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly – a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.