Inspiring Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
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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.

--Henry David Thoreau

The universe is wider than our views of it.

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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.

--Henry David Thoreau

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

--Henry David Thoreau

Background Photo: Cullan Smith

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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.

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

--Henry David Thoreau

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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

Background Photo: Sonil Trivedi

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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.

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

That government is best which governs least.

--Henry David Thoreau

Longer Version:

That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

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.

--Henry David Thoreau

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.

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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.

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

Background Photo: Markus Spiske

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Henry David Thoreau

Longer Version:

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. I wish to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, everyday phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

--Henry David Thoreau

Longer Version:

The language of friendship is not words , but rather meanings. It is an intelligence above language.

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

--Henry David Thoreau

Longer Version:

lIt's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.