Henry David Thoreau

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”

“The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

“We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.”

“Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”

“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.”

“for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.”

“We are constantly invited to be what we are.”

“Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.”

“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

“Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.”

“One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors.”

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.”

“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”

“How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!”

“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?”

“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.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

“I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.”

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