"Whatever you are, be a good one."
Abraham Lincoln
16th president of US (1809 - 1865)
Post your favorite quote by an actual person.
How about checking first to ensure that it is an *actual *quote by an actual person?
It also appears on this Lincoln quote debunking page and this one.
Wrong forum too.
Other than that…good topic. I have several pinned to my bulletin board above my desk but my favorite is Winston Churchill’s “Never give up! Never give up! Never give up!”
Tough crowd!
Here’s one from my Dad: “Do something, even if it’s wrong!”
From this page is a perplexing quote of Thoreau’s
There’s the possibility that he was heavily into Irony at the time.
To Zeldar. Considering he was living in a friend’s place on Walden Pond and his mother left his supper on the doorstep every night, may be. 
But I have one of his quotes on my bulletin board, too: “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.” So he was consistent and mulling over acquisitions, apparently.
But when considering an impulse buy it always makes me ask his paraphrased question To dust or not to dust? That is the question.
“The problem with internet quotes is that you cant always depend on their accuracy” -Abraham Lincoln
The “irony” here is that the repetition violates the concept of simplification. It’s sort of like “Eschew verbose obfuscation.” Nobody’s arguing that simplification wasn’t a major concept for Thoreau or that he didn’t make efforts to achieve such.