Henry David Thoreau Quotes
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears however measured or far away.
The frontiers are not east or west north or south but wherever a man fronts a fact.
Simplicity simplicity simplicity. I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.
When I hear music I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.
I think that there is nothing not even crime more opposed to poetry to philosophy ay to life itself than this incessant business.
However mean your life is meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.
Where there is a brave man in the thickest of the fight there is the post of honor.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong as when you find a trout in the milk.
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
There is not so good an understanding between any two but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness.
In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore though they should fall immediately they had better aim at something high.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
If I knew ... that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good I should run for my life.
To know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know that is true knowledge.
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.
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.
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines.
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully though I never received one cent for it.
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may Old time is still a-flying. And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.
Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it bury it unearth it and gnaw it still.
Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.
What a man thinks of himself that is what determines or rather indicates his fate.
Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.
Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Simplicity simplicity simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. ... Simplify simplify.