Henry David Thoreau

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Make the most of your regrets never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.