"I have a room all to myself;..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.”

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.”

“The still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel.”

“Changes in the universe are not in the Absolute; they are in nature.”

“If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many.”

“The body of the earth is of the nature of a fish... because it draws water as its breath instead of air.”

“I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.”

“Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.”

“I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery.”