Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

— Henry David Thoreau

In the long run you hit only what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.

— Henry David Thoreau

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

— Henry David Thoreau

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.

— Henry David Thoreau

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

— Henry David Thoreau

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

— Henry David Thoreau

That government is best which governs least.

— Henry David Thoreau

This American government -- what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

— Henry David Thoreau

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

— Henry David Thoreau

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

— Henry David Thoreau

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

— Henry David Thoreau

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

— Henry David Thoreau

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

— Henry David Thoreau

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature --if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you --know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

— Henry David Thoreau

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

— Henry David Thoreau

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

— Henry David Thoreau

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

— Henry David Thoreau

Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

— Henry David Thoreau

Humility like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights.

— Henry David Thoreau

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

— Henry David Thoreau

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

— Henry David Thoreau

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

— Henry David Thoreau

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.

— Henry David Thoreau

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

— Henry David Thoreau

To inherit property is not to be born -- it is to be still-born, rather.

— Henry David Thoreau

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.

— Henry David Thoreau

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

— Henry David Thoreau

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails -- aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

— Henry David Thoreau

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

— Henry David Thoreau

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

— Henry David Thoreau

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

— Henry David Thoreau

We hate the kindness which we understand.

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

— Henry David Thoreau

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

— Henry David Thoreau

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

— Henry David Thoreau

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right.

— Henry David Thoreau

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

— Henry David Thoreau

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

— Henry David Thoreau

I say, break the law.

— Henry David Thoreau

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.

— 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. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?

— Henry David Thoreau

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

— Henry David Thoreau

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

— Henry David Thoreau

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. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

— Henry David Thoreau

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.

— Henry David Thoreau

There is no remedy for love than to love more.

— Henry David Thoreau

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

— Henry David Thoreau

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

— Henry David Thoreau

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

— Henry David Thoreau

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.

— Henry David Thoreau

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

— Henry David Thoreau

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

— Henry David Thoreau

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.

— Henry David Thoreau

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

— Henry David Thoreau

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

— Henry David Thoreau

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

— Henry David Thoreau

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

— Henry David Thoreau

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

— Henry David Thoreau

The only wealth is life.

— Henry David Thoreau

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

— Henry David Thoreau

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

— Henry David Thoreau

Don't be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

— Henry David Thoreau

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.

— Henry David Thoreau

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

— Henry David Thoreau

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

— Henry David Thoreau

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

— Henry David Thoreau

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

— Henry David Thoreau

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

— Henry David Thoreau

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

— Henry David Thoreau

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit it and read it are old women over their tea.

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

— Henry David Thoreau

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

— Henry David Thoreau

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

— Henry David Thoreau

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

— Henry David Thoreau

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

— Henry David Thoreau

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.

— Henry David Thoreau

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

— Henry David Thoreau

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

— Henry David Thoreau

Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

— Henry David Thoreau

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

— Henry David Thoreau

I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

— Henry David Thoreau

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

— Henry David Thoreau

There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

— Henry David Thoreau

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

— Henry David Thoreau

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

— Henry David Thoreau

The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.

— Henry David Thoreau

I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make use and get advantage of her as I can, as is usual in such cases.

— Henry David Thoreau

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.

— Henry David Thoreau

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

Be not simply good; be good for something.

— Henry David Thoreau