Henry David Thoreau Quotes
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A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
By Henry David Thoreau
A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.
By Henry David Thoreau
A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.
By Henry David Thoreau
A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
By Henry David Thoreau
A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.
By Henry David Thoreau
A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him
By Henry David Thoreau
A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. - from Live Without Principle
By Henry David Thoreau
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
By Henry David Thoreau
Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie; and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it.
By Henry David Thoreau
We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
By Henry David Thoreau
Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.
By Henry David Thoreau
The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
By Henry David Thoreau
I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.
By Henry David Thoreau
As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
By Henry David Thoreau
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
By Henry David Thoreau
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
By Henry David Thoreau
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that 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. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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.
By Henry David Thoreau
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
By Henry David Thoreau
Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
By Henry David Thoreau
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
By Henry David Thoreau