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Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
– Henry David Thoreau
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
– Henry David Thoreau
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
– Henry David Thoreau
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
– Henry David Thoreau
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
– Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
– Henry David Thoreau
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts - a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.
– Henry David Thoreau
We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.
– Henry David Thoreau
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
– Henry David Thoreau
We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
– Henry David Thoreau
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
– Henry David Thoreau
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
– Henry David Thoreau
What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.
– Henry David Thoreau
What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
– Henry David Thoreau
What is once well done is done forever.
– Henry David Thoreau
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
– Henry David Thoreau
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
– Henry David Thoreau
What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
– Henry David Thoreau
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.
– Henry David Thoreau
In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round -- for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost -- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
– Henry David Thoreau
He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
– Henry David Thoreau
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
– Henry David Thoreau
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.
– Henry David Thoreau
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.
– Henry David Thoreau
Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.
– Henry David Thoreau
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
– Henry David Thoreau
I stand in awe of my body.
– Henry David Thoreau
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
– Henry David Thoreau
Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
– Henry David Thoreau
Men are born to succeed, not fail.
– Henry David Thoreau
My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
– Henry David Thoreau
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
– Henry David Thoreau
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
– Henry David Thoreau
The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.
– Henry David Thoreau
What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
– Henry David Thoreau
[Water is] the only drink for a wise man.
– Henry David Thoreau
He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.
– Henry David Thoreau
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
– Henry David Thoreau
Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.
– Henry David Thoreau
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
– Henry David Thoreau
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
– Henry David Thoreau
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.
– Henry David Thoreau
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
– Henry David Thoreau
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
– Henry David Thoreau
Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
– Henry David Thoreau
Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.
– Henry David Thoreau
True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
– Henry David Thoreau
To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.
– Henry David Thoreau
Those whom we can love, we can hate to others we are indifferent.
– Henry David Thoreau
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
– Henry David Thoreau
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
– Henry David Thoreau
There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.
– Henry David Thoreau
There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.
– Henry David Thoreau
There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.
– Henry David Thoreau
There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.
– Henry David Thoreau
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
– Henry David Thoreau
There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.
– Henry David Thoreau
The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.
– Henry David Thoreau
The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
– Henry David Thoreau
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
– Henry David Thoreau
The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
– Henry David Thoreau
The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.
– Henry David Thoreau
The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
– Henry David Thoreau
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
– Henry David Thoreau
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
– Henry David Thoreau
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.
– Henry David Thoreau
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
– Henry David Thoreau
Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
– Henry David Thoreau
Men have become the tools of their tools.
– Henry David Thoreau
Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
– Henry David Thoreau
Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
– Henry David Thoreau
May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!
– Henry David Thoreau
Live the life you've dreamed.
– Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
– Henry David Thoreau
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
– Henry David Thoreau
It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
– Henry David Thoreau
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
– Henry David Thoreau
Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.
– Henry David Thoreau
In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
– Henry David Thoreau
Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.
– Henry David Thoreau
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
– Henry David Thoreau
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
– Henry David Thoreau
If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?
– Henry David Thoreau
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.
– Henry David Thoreau
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
– Henry David Thoreau
I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
– Henry David Thoreau
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.
– Henry David Thoreau
I had three chairs in my house one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
– Henry David Thoreau
Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.
– Henry David Thoreau
God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.
– Henry David Thoreau
Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.
– Henry David Thoreau
Faith never makes a confession.
– Henry David Thoreau
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
– Henry David Thoreau
Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
– Henry David Thoreau
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
– Henry David Thoreau
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.
– Henry David Thoreau
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?
– Henry David Thoreau
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
– Henry David Thoreau
As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.
– Henry David Thoreau
All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
– Henry David Thoreau