Quotes by Henry David Thoreau (Page 5 of 6)

Simplicity is the law of nature for men as well as for flowers.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined.

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.

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.

Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Spring-an experience in immortality.

What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?

My Thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite -- only a sense of existence.

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.

In proportion as a person simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude.

I stand in awe of my body.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

My profession is always to be alert, to find God in nature, to know God's lurking places, to attend to all the oratorios and the operas in nature.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

Wildness is the preservation of the world.

All good things are wild and free.

Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.

For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.

Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.

The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.

We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.

Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.

Humility, like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights.

I make myself rich by making my wants few.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.

Friends… they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes.

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

Faith never makes a confession.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

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

'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

Being is the great explainer.

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.

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

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

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

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

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

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

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

An unclean person is universally a slothful one.

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

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

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.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

To be awake is to be alive.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

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

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.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

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.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

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.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

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

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

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

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

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.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

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

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.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

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

It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

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

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

That government is best which governs least.

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.

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.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

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.

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

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

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

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

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

Men have become the tools of their tools.