I've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.
Erma Bombeck

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.
Erma Bombeck

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
Erma Bombeck

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

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
Henry David Thoreau

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
Henry David Thoreau

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
Henry David Thoreau

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Henry David Thoreau

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
Henry David Thoreau

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.
Henry David Thoreau

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.
Henry David Thoreau

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
Henry David Thoreau

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
Henry David Thoreau

Truths and roses have thorns about them.
Henry David Thoreau

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.
W. Clement Stone

Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving.
W. Clement Stone