Henry David Thoreau

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Live in each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding ; How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth.

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

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

The cost of a thing is something called life which is given in exchange for it.

When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.

I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.