Henry David Thoreau Quotes

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?

If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

All that man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love-to sing, and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.

Love does not analyze its object.

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labour of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.

On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.

The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way .

He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

Only the defeated and deserters go to war.

After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.

He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.

There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.

The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.

I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good.

The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand.

I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.

Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.

Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.

Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.

Much is published, but little printed.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.

The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.

Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote.

It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give.

When a man dies he kicks the dust.

To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.

In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.

We 've wholly forgotten how to die. But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when to end.

One can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contemplation and the observation of nature.

I have not earned what I have already enjoyed.