How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau Quotations
We found 180 matching quotations.
Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.
There are now-a-days professors of philosophy but not philosophers.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.
In the long run you only hit what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
Make the most of your regrets. . . . To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.
To reget deeply is to live afresh.
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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.
What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.
The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence about language.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
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. It looks poorest when you are the richest.
Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
Any fool can make a rule,
and any fool will mind it.
and any fool will mind it.
That government is best which governs least. - from Civil Disobedience
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
The cost of a things is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.
We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.
What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought , and attended to my answer.
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.
Things do not change we change.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.
I have lived some thirty years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
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 he hears, how ever measured or far away.
I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake his neighbours up.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.
Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, cattle, barns, and farming tools, for these are more easily acquired than gotten rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in.
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.
What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.
What a man thinks of himself that is what determines, or rather indicates his fate.
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
[Water is] the only drink for a wise man.
If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated
What does education often do It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make-Believe!
To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
To affect the quality of the day that is the art of life.
The man for whom law exists -- the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.
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.
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions know that you are alone in the world.
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
Government never furthered any enterprise but the alacrity with which it got out of the way.
It takes two to speak the truth--one to speak and the other to hear.
Live each season as it passes breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
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.
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
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 faraway.
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth
We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.
Water is the only drink for a wise man.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality.
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.
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
It takes two to speak truth - One to speak, and another to hear.
In wildness is the preservation of the world. - from Walking
I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at its root.
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.
The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
In wilderness is the preservation of the world.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it but as I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.
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.
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy we reason from our hands to our head.
It is not enough to be busy the question is what are we busy about
In the long run, you hit only what you aim at: Therefore aim high.
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
Heroes are often the most ordinary of men.
True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? 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.
Men have become the tools of their tools
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.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your success.
As if there were safety in stupidity alone.
The man for whom law exists - the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.
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.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Be not simply good - be good for something.
All good things are wild, and free.
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.
I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which these things would be by me unavoidable.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Men are born to succeed, not fail.
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Things do not change; we change.
Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.
Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
No one is so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.
Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.
Faint heart never won true friend. O my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend I may be yours.
The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.
We falsely attribute to men a determined character - putting together all their yesterdays - and averaging them - we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support - it is worse than a large family - he is the silent poor indeed.
Many go fishing without knowing it is fish they are after.
For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
I stand in awe of my body.