Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made."

"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."

"Things do not change; we change."

"Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid."

"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself."

"Things do not change; we change."

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

"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 many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

"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."

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."

"All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be."

"I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics."

"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself."

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

"Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

"I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune."

"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations."