Explore Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake. You must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand-heap. You must have so good an appetite as this, else you will live in vain

The dry grasses are not dead for me. A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another.

As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend.

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.

Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.

It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.

The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.

Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?

It's only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God.

Time cannot bend the line which God has writ.

Time is like a handful of sand - the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers.

If you will not try, you will go to your grave with your song still inside you.

The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.

In their daily life, all are braver than they know.

In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts.

The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burrs.

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. . . . In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

A man may esteem himself happy when that which is his food is also his medicine.

One should be always on the trail of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, _x000D_ Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, _x000D_ as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned _x000D_ from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively _x000D_ an interaction of man on man.