"It is after we get home that..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?”

“How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!”

“It is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we beginto keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.”

“Be assured that every man's success is in proportion to his average ability. The meadow flowers spring and bloom where the watersannually deposit their slime, not where they reach in some freshet only. A man is not his hope, nor his despair, nor yet his past deed. We know not yet what we have done, still less what we are doing. Wait till evening, and other parts of our day's work will shine than we had thought at noon, and we shall discover the real purport of our toil. As when the farmer has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can tell best where the pressed earth shines most.”

“Intentional living is the bridge to significance. At the end of every year, I take time out to reflect and evaluate the events of the previous year - what went well and what needed improvement. From that inventory, I lay out my next year - how I intend to live, make the best use of time and maximize adding value to others. Success asks, 'How can I add value to myself?' Significance asks, 'How can I add value to others?' It is your intention that lends itself to significance.”

“Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." . . . And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered.”

“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.”

“It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.”

“Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over.”