Henry David Thoreau

“I cannot make my days longer. So I strive to make them better.”

“Silence alone is worthy to be heard.”

“Live the life you've dreamed.”

“I make myself rich by making my wants few.”

“Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”

“We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.”

“It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.”

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

“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.”

“This world is but a canvas to our imagination.”

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”

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

“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”

“Men have become the tools of their tools.”

“Simplify, simplify.”

Walden; or, Life in the Woods. 1854. Book.

“There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.”

“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.”

“The perception of beauty is a moral test.”

“That government is best which governs least.”

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

“Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.”