Henry David Thoreau

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.All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men and brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life… I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life… to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

If thou art clean and warm, it is sufficient; for more doth but rob the Poor, and please the Wanton.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.