HENRY DAVID THOREAU

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters."

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

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”"

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

"The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."

"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 he hears, however measured or far away."

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."

"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth."

"All good things are wild and free."

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

"Things do not change; we change."

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake."

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

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

"I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest."

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."

"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."

"Wildness is the preservation of the World."

"The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings."

"As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness."

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

"An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day."

"The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend."

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

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

"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes."

"This world is but canvas to our imaginations."

"Simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real."

"Write while the heat is in you."

"Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence."

"It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?"

"Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary."

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

"If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see."

"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it."

"Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself."

"A written word is the choicest of relics."

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

"We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice."

"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."

"Friends, they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams."

"Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then."