Henry David Thoreau

“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making t...”

“If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?”

“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover...”

“If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.”

“All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.”

“There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.”

“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”

“It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.”

“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.”

“We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.”

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”

“I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below...”

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”

“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.”

“An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”

“A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.”

“After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.”

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”

“There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.”