Henry David Thoreau

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

What you do makes a difference. And you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

There are charms made only for distant admiration.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Anger is short madness

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

If it be an evil to judge rashly or untruly any single man, how much a greater sin it is to condemn a whole people.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.