Henry David Thoreau

“I'd rather walk to California than ride the train.”

“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

“It takes two to speak truth — one to speak and another to hear.”

“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

“I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”

“We are constantly invited to be what we are.”

“I make myself rich by making my wants few.”

“What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook.”

“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.”

“There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.”

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”

“Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”

“There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.”

“When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place.”

“Old shoes will fit best.”

“I love a broad margin to my life.”

“An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers.”

“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”