Henry David Thoreau

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

“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults e...”

“That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.”

“A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.”

“There is not so good an understanding between any two, but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness.”

“How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.”

“The language of friendship is not words, but meanings.”

“Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.”

“In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fall immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“It's only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God.”

“Man is the artificer of his own happiness.”

“To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

“Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.”

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”

“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”

“The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”

“For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.”