Henry David Thoreau Quotes
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still
The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds.
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.
for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.
A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.
We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven
Now-a-days, men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will.
Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!
that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it shor
It is not enought to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.
To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death
I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.
No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.
It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.
Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.
There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, and not a grain more. ... A man sees only what concerns him.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.
Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.
The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.
Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.
