If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Henry David Thoreau
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.
Henry David Thoreau
Being is the great explainer.
Henry David Thoreau
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.
Henry David Thoreau
Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.
Henry David Thoreau
We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.
Henry David Thoreau
The sun is but a morning star.
Henry David Thoreau
If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?
Henry David Thoreau
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
Henry David Thoreau
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
Henry David Thoreau
Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.