Quotes By 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.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

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

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

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

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.

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

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

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

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

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

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

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

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

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

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.