Henry David Thoreau

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

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

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

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

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.

Part of her mystery is how she is calm in the storm and anxious in the quiet.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

Are you using your pain as an excuse or as a source of strength?

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

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked what I thought, and attended to my answer.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

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.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.