Henry David Thoreau quotes.
All 43 quotations by Henry David Thoreau in our collection.
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined.”
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
“Silence alone is worthy to be heard.”
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
“I cannot make my days longer. So I strive to make them better.”
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”
“Character is what you are when no one is looking.”
“Men have become the tools of their tools.”
“I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. 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.”
“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
“Live the life you've dreamed.”
“This world is but a canvas to our imagination.”
“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
“That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.”
“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.”
“We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.”
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
“Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.”
“Those whom we can love, we can hate to others we are indifferent.”
“It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.”
“I make myself rich by making my wants few.”
“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”
“I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.”
“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”
“The language of excitement is at best picturesque; merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.”
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
“The language of friendship is not words but meanings.”
“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready to go.”
“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”
“Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”
“The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.”
“Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
“In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.”
“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
“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.”
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