Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or temple on earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
Henry David Thoreau
As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.
Henry David Thoreau
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
Henry David Thoreau
Beware all enterprises that require new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Henry David Thoreau
It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.
Henry David Thoreau
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.
Henry David Thoreau
I have travelled a good deal in Concord.
Henry David Thoreau
He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life.
Henry David Thoreau
City life - millions of people being lonesome together.
Henry David Thoreau
Where there is a brave man in the thickest of the fight there is the post of honor.
Henry David Thoreau
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imaged he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
Henry David Thoreau
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
Henry David Thoreau
Simplicity simplicity simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. ... Simplify simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
This life is not for complaint but for satisfaction.
Henry David Thoreau
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
Henry David Thoreau
What a man thinks of himself that is what determines or rather indicates his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Henry David Thoreau
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.
Henry David Thoreau
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.
Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau
It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.
Henry David Thoreau
Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Henry David Thoreau
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
Henry David Thoreau
The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
Politics is the gizzard of society full of gut and gravel.
Henry David Thoreau
Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.
Henry David Thoreau
Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it bury it unearth it and gnaw it still.
Henry David Thoreau
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
Henry David Thoreau
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may Old time is still a-flying. And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.
Henry David Thoreau
The eye is the jewel of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
Gnaw your own bone gnaw at it bury it unearth it gnaw it still.
Henry David Thoreau
When I would recreate myself I seek the darkest wood the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength the marrow of Nature.
Henry David Thoreau
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully though I never received one cent for it.
Henry David Thoreau
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau
Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Henry David Thoreau
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.
Henry David Thoreau
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
Henry David Thoreau
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.
Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau
It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.
Henry David Thoreau