Henry David Thoreau

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

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.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.