"But men labor under a mistake. The..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.”

“Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East -- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them -- who were above such trifling.”

“Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet: he it is who makes the truest use of the pine-who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane. . . .”

“No man (sic) has learned to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. Length without breadth is like a self-contained tributary having no outward flow to the ocean. Stagnant, still and stale, it lacks both life and freshness. In order to live creatively and meaningfully, our self-concern must be wedded to other concerns.”

“Nonviolence, applied to very large masses of mankind, is a new experiment in the history of the world.”

“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

“No labour is too mean for one who wants to earn an honest penny.”

“The world is agreed that labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied. There is no dispute upon this point.”

“Labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men.”