It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
~ Henry David Thoreau
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
The heart is forever inexperienced.
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.
