Henry David Thoreau's Quotes

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.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

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

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

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

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

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

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

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

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

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

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

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

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

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

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

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

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

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

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

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.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

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

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

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

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

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

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

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

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

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

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

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.

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

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

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

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

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.