Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?
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.
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
