Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.

A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.

We must have infinite faith in each other.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

I have travelled a good deal in Concord.

You must speak loud to those who are hard of hearing.

Let go of the past and live the future . . . Live the life you imagined.

If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him . . he will be surrounded by grandeur.

The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.

We are more anxious to speak than to be heard.

Here or nowhere is our heaven.

Sell your clothes- keep your thoughts.

He who cuts down woods beyond a certain limit exterminates birds.

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.

We must look a long time before we can see

It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.

We are older by faith than by experience.

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.

A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors

Hate can pardon more than love.

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.

The movements of the eyes express the perpetual and unconscious courtesy of the parties.

Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed.

We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend.

As for health, consider yourself well.

I do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.

Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed; it is itself a reform.

If you would be chaste, you must be temperate.

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?

The Library is a wilderness of books.

I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.

Remember that you need not eat unless you are hungry.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

A goal is a dream taken seriously.

He listens equally to the prayers of the believer and the unbeliever.

Do not engage to find things as you think they are.

What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives.

...A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from - toward; it is the history of every one of us. It is a great art to saunter.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

What we need to know in any case is very simple.

Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life?

Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

Some creatures are made to see in the dark.