Walden

by Henry David Thoreau

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

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?

I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it

More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man’s field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life.