Henry David Thoreau

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

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

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

The affairs of the world will go on forever. Do not delay the practice of meditation.

We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.

It’s like something shifted when I spoke to you, I can’t even put words to it. This sense of gentle peace, space, lightness, freedom. The realization that the longing I carried for so long, that pain was not about him all along. It was the yearning to return to that place from which, once upon a time, we all came.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Love grows. Lust wastes by Enjoyment, and the Reason is, that one springs from an Union of Souls, and the other from an Union of Sense.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Our best history is still poetry.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.