Henry David Thoreau

"Any man who takes himself too seriously is in danger, constant danger of losing his sense of proportion."

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see."

"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated into insolence."

"I wanted to live deliberately, to strip life down to its essentials."

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

"All things are moral; and in their boundless changes rearrange themselves anew into an endless variety of combinations under the magical wheels and gravitational forces of nature."

"The civilization of the body is an accomplished fact. But the civilization of the mind and heart remains to be done."

"I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with success."

"What men call good society and winning the world easily, I call the way to lose the soul."

"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

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

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand."

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."

"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."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life."

"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."

"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?"

"The only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a life as may enable you to do without these."

"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning."

"Nature never wears the same expression twice."

"Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence."

"All good things are wild, and free, yet how few enjoy them."

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

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

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."

"The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable."

"Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection."

"I learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot."

"The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimension."