Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 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", (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Here Is A Selection Of Some Of Henry David Thoreau Most Famous Quotes: Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Life, Happiness, Love. Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Success, Self Reliance. Walden Quotes On The Value Of Knowing Yourself And Simplicity, Individuality. Quotes About Life, Nature, Woods And Freedom By Henry David Thoreau.
Henry David Thoreau Quotes and Sayings
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that 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.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
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.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
All good things are wild and free.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
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 he hears, however measured or far away.
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Things do not change; we change.
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.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
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.
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?
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.
This world is but canvas to our imaginations.
It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make - believe.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.
It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.
We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.
The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
The universe is wider than our views of it.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.
A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Wildness is the preservation of the World.
Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.
The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Friends.... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.
I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
We are constantly invited to be what we are.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
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.
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in it's gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Renew thyself completely each day.
I make myself rich by making my wants few.
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.
I have a room all to myself; it is nature.
The heart is forever inexperienced.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us.
The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town.... he can walk out the gate empty - handed and without anxiety.
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
Life in us is like the water in a river.
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.
Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?
It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.
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.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.
The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day.
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.
The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.
Be yourself-not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.
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