Henry David Thoreau

To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

It's not what you get, but what you give that determines your true worth.

I love my friends, but I do not want to absorb them.

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering for a great while at the eaves of an old church.

The only way to get a friend is to be one.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

No man ever had a more agreeable dwelling place than this. It was a proper palace, a fit abode for a king.

I perceive that, when an old man has done what he has to do, and has said what he has to say, he is as ready to go as an old clock to strike.

It is never too late to give up your prejudices.

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

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and so make sure of twenty digits.

Simplify, simplify.

I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul will grow sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

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.