Henry David Thoreau

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I’m sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.

Be your authentic self. Your authentic self is who you are when you have no fear of judgment, or before the world starts pushing you around and telling you who you’re supposed to be. Your fictional self is who you are when you have a social mask on to please everyone else. Give yourself permission to be your authentic self.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.

The love we were promised in fairy tales was never something for us to find. It has always been something for us to create.

Don’t make me put your head in my blender!

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta give yourself what you wish you were getting from someone else.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

I don’t expect to retire. Every man must work, that’s his natural destiny.

Love is not just looking at each other, it’s looking in the same direction.

What is important is not the right doctrine but the attainment of the true experience. It is giving up believing in belief.

Enduring habits I hate…. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

They’re different kinds of challenges depending upon what phase of life I’m in.