Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit; is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.

Where the most beautiful wild flowers grow, there mans spirit is fed and poets grow.

I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.

Any sincere thought is irresistible.

The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me.

Time cannot bend the line which God has writ.

Things don't change. We change.

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience, but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

In ancient days the Pythagoreans were used to change names with each other,--fancying that each would share the virtues they admired in the other.

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion.

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

We begin to praise when we begin to see a thing needs our assistance.

Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

I have myself to respect, but to myself I am not amiable; but my friend is my amiableness personified.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

Being is the great explainer.

That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.

Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

However mean your life is, meet it and live it.

When a man truly commits, the universe will conspire to assure his success.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.

Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.

Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.

Life in us is like the water in a river.

The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise.

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

Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.