From wikipedia:

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Quotes:

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

This world is but a canvas for our imagination.