Explore Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Do not despair of your life. You have force enough to overcome your obstacles.

Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. . . . Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?

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

Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.

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

The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.

The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.

Waves of a serene life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

We live but a fraction of our lives.

When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.

It is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world, which the humblest man has not faculties to surmount.

Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet: he it is who makes the truest use of the pine-who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane. . . .

The virtue which we appreciate, we to some extent appropriate.

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.