Henry David Thoreau

“Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.”

“I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sab...”

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our...”

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

“What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?”

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnani...”

“It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.”

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.”

“Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbe...”

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but S...”

“As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Pro...”

“Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. A...”

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the fu...”

“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”

“Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.”

“God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetu...”

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

“It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.”

“Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.”

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When...”