Quotes By Henry David Thoreau

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

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.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one... characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

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.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

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.

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.

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?