Faith never makes a confession.
Henry David Thoreau
Profession: Author Nationality: American
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.
Throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
My greatest skill has been to want little.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.
What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.
I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto,—That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
Men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries.
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.
