Explore Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest - but suffer from a constant strain.

Simplify, simplify.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

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.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it.