Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music in which he hears, however measured, or far away.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
The heart is forever inexperienced.
I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
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.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
If you give money, spend yourself with it.
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
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.
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.
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
