"Read the best books first, or you..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

“The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.”

“The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice.”

“but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

“You must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”

“Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!”

“The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.”

“Shut not your doors to me proud libraries.”

“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”