Henry David Thoreau

I think that there is nothing not even crime more opposed to poetry to philosophy ay to life itself than this incessant business.

When I hear music I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.

Simplicity simplicity simplicity. I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.

Whate'er we leave to God God does and blesses us.

The frontiers are not east or west north or south but wherever a man fronts a fact.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

When a dog runs at you whistle for him.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears however measured or far away.

He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

It is never too late to give up your prejudices

Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.

A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.

If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know how much truth is stronger than errors, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

Philanthropy is. . . greatly overrated. A pain in the gut is not sympathy for the underprivileged, but the result of eating a green apple; the philanthropist gives to ease his own pain.

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.