Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. – Henry David Thoreau
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. – Henry David Thoreau
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. – Henry David Thoreau
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. – Henry David Thoreau
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive. – Henry David Thoreau
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. – Henry David Thoreau
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. – Henry David Thoreau
I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened. – Henry David Thoreau
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. – Henry David Thoreau
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? – Henry David Thoreau
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect. – Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. – Henry David Thoreau
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. – Henry David Thoreau
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him. – Henry David Thoreau
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. – Henry David Thoreau
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. – Henry David Thoreau
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn. – Henry David Thoreau