Walden

by Henry David Thoreau

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

my greatest skill has been to want but little—so

I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.