Henry David Thoreau

What is commonly called friendship is only a little more honor among rogues.

What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.

The imagination never forgets; it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.

As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up.

Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.

What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

Whatever your sex or position, life is a battle in which you are to show your pluck, and woe be to the coward. Whether passed on a bed of sickness or a tented field, it is ever the same fair play and admits no foolish distinction. Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

They take great pride in making their dinner cost much; I take my pride in making my dinner cost so little.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

I have no time to be in a hurry.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

Our thoughts are epochs in our lives; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blow while we are here.