Henry David Thoreau

"I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds"

"The indulgence of these propensities is inconsistent with the preservation of my higher nature"

"All good things are wild and free"

"Most men appear never to have considered what a house is"

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion"

"I have as much or more than I want"

"Walden is dead and gone, and I awake"

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer"

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams"

"All things are moral, and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature"

"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination"

"The youth may build or plant or sail or do nothing but go idling along"

"Measure your wealth by what you'd have left if you lost all your money"

"Wealth is the ability to fully experience life"

"Civil disobedience is the answer to an unjust government"

"The only obligation I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right"

"Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new"

"In the long run, success usually comes to those who hustle while they wait"

"The wilderness is healing"

"Pursue your passion, not your pension"

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

"I have learned, that 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."

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."

"The only wealth is life. Life is the only wealth."

"Most of the luxuries and many of the so called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."

"Nature never wears the same expression twice, for her moods change oftener than the clothes of mortals."

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains."