Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Henry David Thoreau.
Last updated on September 9, 2024.
Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A 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 disobedience to an unjust state.
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
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.
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
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.
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
Things do not change; we change.
There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.
Live the life you've dreamed.
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
Be not simply good - be good for something.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.