Henry David Thoreau

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it.”

“The poorest fellow may have a sunset.”

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

“Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”

“Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.”

“I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

“The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.”

“Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present.”

“Sympathy with the unborn and the not yet to be born is the noblest emotion of all.”

“There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.”

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”

“Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.”

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

“Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body.”

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.”

“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”

“Things do not change; we change.”

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”