Quotes By Henry David Thoreau

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.