Henry David Thoreau

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

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

The only wealth is life.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity’s mind and were willing to reveal it.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

The less government we have the better.

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

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Let us then try what love can do to mend a broken world.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.