Henry David Thoreau Quotes: 70

• There is no remedy for love but to love more.

• Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

• 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.

• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

• 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.

  Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

• Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

• Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

• We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

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

  Walden

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

• This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

• I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

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

• Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

• Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

• Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

  Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

• Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

  Walden

• True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

• Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.

• I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

• Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

• As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

  Walden

• Things do not change; we change.

  Walden

• Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

• A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

• If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

  I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

• Any fool can make a ruleAnd any fool will mind it.

  Journal #14

• The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

  Walden

• As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

• All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

  Walden

• The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.

  A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

• 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.

• 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.

• Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

  Walden

• It's not worth our while to let our imperfections disturb us always.

• How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

  Walden

• It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

  Letters to Various Persons

• 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.

  Walden

• Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

• There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

  Walden, or Life in the Woods

• 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.

  Walden

• Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

• The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

• A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

  Walden

• Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

• The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

• On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.

• To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor 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.

• Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

• What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?

  Thoreau Journal 9

• We are constantly invited to be who we are.

• Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

• What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

• When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

  Walden

• Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

• Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

• Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

• Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

• It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.

• He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.

• 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.

• Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

• I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

  Walden

• Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.

• It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.

  Walden & Resistance to Civil Government

• 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.

• I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.

  Walden

• Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

  Walden

• Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

  Walden and Other Writings

• Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.

  Walden