Thoreau

• The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.


• We are more anxious to speak than to be heard.


• Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love.


• All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.


• Spring-an experience in immortality.


• Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.


• Dreams are touchstones of our characters.


• A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.


• What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.


• A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.


• Any man more right than his neighbour constitutes a majority of one.


• I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour.


• Lo! Men have become tools of their tools[said on automation].


• What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?


• It is never too late to give up your prejudices.


• Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.


• Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.


• The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.


• Law never made man a whit more just.


• What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue.


• Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God. A wise man will dispense with repentance. It is shocking and passionate. God prefers that you approach him thoughtful, not penitent.


• Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member.


• The mass of men are unpoetic, yet that Adam that names things is always a poet.


• Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. The author's character is read from title-page to end. Of this he never corrects the proof.


• Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also aprison.


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


• The mass of men lead life of quiet desperation.


• There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking it at its root.


• I never found a companion that was so companiable as solitude.


• At what expense any valuable work is performed! At the expense of a life! If you do one thing well, what else are you good for in the meanwhile?


• The artist must work with indifferency-too great interest vitiates his work.


• The heroic actions are performed by such as are oppressed by the meanness of their lives. As in thickest darkness the star shine the brightest.


• It is not worth while to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.


• It is not enough to be busy...the question is: what are we busy about?


• What the first philosopher taught to the last will have to repeat.