Quotes By Henry David Thoreau

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

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

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

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

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.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

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

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

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

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

That government is best which governs least.

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.

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 which he hears, however measured or far away.

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

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.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

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

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

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

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

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

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.

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

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

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

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

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

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