Henry David Thoreau

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

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

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new.

You bring out the be(a)st in me. Polarized tension, a raw slash of claw, swathed softly in love. A peace of my mind in tumultuous chaotic razor-sharp clarity, impulsive wit to wisdom, mixing addictive shots of cocktail emotions in a full-spectrum experience.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Wake up, you’ve been sleeping. Take up your bed and walk. Stop blaming other people. Oh, it’s nobody else’s fault.

The connection between us runs so strong and deep. It’s like a steel cable stretching across the ocean bed, so many fathoms below, that even the most skilled and courageous of deep sea divers cannot reach it to cut it. It remains strong, silent, invisible, invincible.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

They say that history repeats itself, so if you don’t learn from the past you will make the same mistakes. So I have become an archaeologist of my own history. Digging up what has long since been buried, exhuming those forgotten fragments. Trying to distinguish what is real from folklore, trying to gain understanding, rather than relying on myths.