Henry David Thoreau

There is only one path to Heaven. On Earth, we call it Love.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

In my walks, I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

The future is too soon the past. So make perseverance your excellence and go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love.

Love does not analyze its object.

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.

Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. . . . Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?

The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.

Waves of a serene life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather.

We live but a fraction of our lives.

When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.

This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.