Henry David Thoreau

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.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought – with these I deal.

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.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

The stars are the apexes of what triangles!

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.