Top 2798 Quotes & Sayings by Henry David Thoreau - Page 2

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.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

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.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

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

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

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.

What is once well done is done forever.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

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

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

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.