Things do not change; we change.
— Henry David Thoreau
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Truths and roses have thorns about them.
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.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
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.
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
Be not simply good - be good for something.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
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.
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
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.
