Henry David Thoreau quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

  • I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

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

  • Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

  • 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.

  • As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

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

  • 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.

  • Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

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

  • Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

  • The perception of beauty is a moral test.

  • Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

  • The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

  • Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

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

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

  • 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 are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

  • Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

  • In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

  • 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.

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

  • It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

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

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

  • As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

  • Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

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

  • 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.

  • It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

  • 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.

  • 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 language of friendship is not words but meanings.

  • So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

  • 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 have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

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

  • I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest - but suffer from a constant strain.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

  • 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.

  • Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

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

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

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

  • Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

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

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

  • I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

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

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

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

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

  • Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

  • Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

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

  • Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

  • The heart is forever inexperienced.

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

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

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

  • It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

  • That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

  • There is no remedy for love but to love more.

  • Things do not change; we change.

  • Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

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

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

  • Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

  • What is once well done is done forever.

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

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

  • 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.

  • The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.

  • As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

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

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

  • Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

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

  • Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

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

  • The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

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

  • I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

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

  • Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

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

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

  • As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

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

  • It is never too late to give up your prejudices

  • A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

  • Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.

  • Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.

  • 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 whole day as a spectulator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

  • This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him.

  • As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs."

  • It costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in...and if he [the sun] is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided."

  • All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one... characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

  • The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode.

  • What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

  • In Adam's fall We sinned all. In the new Adam's rise, We shall all reach the skies.

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