Henry David Thoreau

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits.

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.

Going from--toward; it is the history of every one of us.

My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground, as chestnuts, etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.

A little thought is sexton to all the world.

Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.

The sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.

You never gain something but that you lose something.

Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention

In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

But why should not the New Englander try new adventures - not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards - and raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men.

. . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

The man of genius knows what he is aiming at; nobody else knows. And he alone knows when something comes between him and his object. In the course of generations, however, men will excuse you for not doing as they do, if you will bring enough to pass in your own way.

When I hear a grown man or woman say, "Once I had faith in men, now I have not," I am inclined to ask, "Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?"

When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?

A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.