Quotes By Henry David Thoreau

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

I have never found a 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.

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.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

An unclean person is universally a slothful one.

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.

Faith never makes a confession.

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.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed.