Henry David Thoreau: Trending quotes (page 10)

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.”

“If you want to be happy, be!”

“In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”

“As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.”

“Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.”

“All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.”

“While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them”

“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.”

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”

“The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in a single, solitary, even humble individual. For it is within the soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.”

“I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?”

“There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.”

“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed
there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

“Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

“The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day.”

“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”