Henry David Thoreau

“If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”

“Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

“I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.”

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”

“There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it.”

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.”

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.”

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”

“Could there be a greater miracle than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?”

“Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.”

“Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.”

“The only true heaven is here on earth.”

“I have learned, that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.”

“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”

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

“I would rather have my feet in the field than in a king's palace.”

“I am a parcel of vain strivings tied / By a chance bond together.”

“Live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”