"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. [....] Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. " -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"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." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"A written word is the choicest of relics." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"In this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth. [....] Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of the saints to the blush?" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man’s house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque pius quaestus), and according to Varro the old Romans 'called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn.'" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run 'amok' against society; but I preferred that society should run 'amok' against me, it being the desperate party." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with! -- to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees [....]" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"He that does not eat need not work." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to -- for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well -- is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? 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. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. " -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Walden_

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"As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"If a man walk 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 whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast?" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself. " -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but, as I love literature, and, to some extent, the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. I have not got to answer for having read a single President's Message. A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed, and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it, - more importunate than an Italian beggar; and if I have a mind to look at its certificate, made, perchance, by some benevolent merchant's clerk, or the skipper that brought it over, for it cannot speak a word of English itself, I shall probably read of the eruption of some Vesuvius, or the overflowing of some Po, true or forged, which brought it into this condition. I do not hesitate, in such a case, to suggest work, or the almshouse; or why not keep its castle in silence, as I do commonly? The poor President, what with preserving his popularity and doing his duty, is completely bewildered. The newspapers are the ruling power. Any other government is reduced to a few marines at Fort Independence. If a man neglects to read the Daily Times, Government will go down on its knees to him, for this is the only treason in these days." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Life Without Principle_

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"They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures and make-shifts, merely. They put off the day of settlement indefinitely, and meanwhile, the debt accumulates." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"The fact which the politician faces is merely, that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"I listen to hear the voice of a Governor, Commander-in-Chief of the forces of Massachusetts. I hear only the creaking of crickets and the hum of insects which now fill the summer air. The Governor's exploit is to review the troops on muster days. I have seen him on horseback, with his hat off, listening to a chaplain's prayer. It chances that is all I have ever seen of a Governor. I think that I could manage to get along without one. If he is not of the least use to prevent my being kidnapped, pray of what important use is he likely to be to me? When freedom is most endangered, he dwells in the deepest obscurity. A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman, because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a Governor." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"Three years ago, also, just a week after the authorities of Boston assembled to carry back a perfectly innocent man, and one whom they knew to be innocent, into slavery, the inhabitants of Concord caused the bells to be rung and the cannons to be fired, to celebrate their liberty, - and the courage and love of liberty of their ancestors who fought at the bridge. As if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others. Now-a-days men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap. I do not know but there are some, who, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could but get one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons, to celebrate their liberty. So some of my townsmen took the liberty to ring and fire; that was the extent of their freedom; and when the sound of the bells died away, their liberty died away also; when the powder was all expended, their liberty went off with the smoke." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual, without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order, who observe the law when the government breaks it." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"Whoever has discerned truth has received his commission from a higher source than the chiefest justice in the world, who can discern only law. He finds himself constituted judge of the judge. - Strange that it should be necessary to state such simple truths." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"The judges and lawyers, - simply as such, I mean, - and all men of expediency, try this case by a very low and incompetent standard. They consider, not whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. Is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? In important moral and vital questions like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not. They persist in being the servants of the worst of men, and not the servants of humanity. " -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"The amount of it is, if the majority vote the devil to be God, the minority will live and behave accordingly, and obey the successful candidate, trusting that some time or other, by some Speaker's casting vote, perhaps, they may reinstate God." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"Show me a free State, and a court truly of justice, and I will fight for them, if need be; but show me Massachusetts, and I refuse her my allegiance, and express contempt for her courts." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable, - of a bad one, to make it less valuable." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"I have lived for the last month, - and I think that every man in Massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar experience, - with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know at first what ailed me. At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them. Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Slavery_in_Massachusetts_

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"Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor conservative. Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!" -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Night_and_Moonlight_

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"Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn? to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring." -- Henry David Thoreau, from _Night_and_Moonlight_

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