Henry David Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day – farther and wider – and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.

The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.

I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

In the scenery of spring, nothing is better, nothing worse; the flowering branches are; some long, some short.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

I am a sky gazer. The sky, it pulls at me. Its amazing eternal expanse of breathtaking beauty calls me back to my senses, stretches my awareness, soothes my eyes, opens my heart, stills me. I feel a soft soul longing to be up there, in the vastness, amongst the clouds that are alive and billow and skud and glow; metamorphosing from perfection into perfection. A constantly changing canvas brushed by magic.

Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.