A Selection of Epigrams from Thoreau's Writings

• Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

• Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.

• The perception of beauty is a moral test.

• It takes a man to make a room silent.

• Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

• As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

• If I am not I, who will be?

• Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

• How trivial and uninteresting and wearisome and unsatisfactory are all employments for which men will pay you money!

• The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.

• Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

• As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up.

• To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

• He is the true artist whose life is his material.