Henry David Thoreau

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are ... rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and portents; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like the brutes,' are directed toward Earth. Some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. The world runs to see the panorama, when there is a panorama in the sky which few go to see.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

Let your walks now be a little more adventurous.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

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.

Not till we are completely lost, or turned round, do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.

We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.