Henry David Thoreau

“How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?”

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”

“There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.”

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

“'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.”

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.”

“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”

“The silence rings—it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible—I hear the unspeakable.”

“The perception of beauty is a moral test.”

“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.”

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”

“That government is best which governs least.”

“There is no just and serene criticism as yet.”

“Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?”

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his honor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.”

“Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”

“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”

“As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at...”

“Dreams are the touchstones of our character.”