Henry David Thoreau

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

“The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?”

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

“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.”

“Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.”

“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.”

“Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which,...”

“Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.”

“I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.”

“Live the life you've dreamed.”

“Dreams are the touchstones of our character.”

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”

“To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”

“What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.”

“I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.”

“The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.”

“The savage in man is never quite eradicated.”

“Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.”

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

“The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?”