The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.
What a man thinks of himself that is what determines or rather indicates his fate.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
This life is not for complaint but for satisfaction.
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
City life - millions of people being lonesome together.
He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life.
I have travelled a good deal in Concord.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.
Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.
In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
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.
