Henry David Thoreau
  • Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

  • 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.

  • If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

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

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