Henry David Thoreau: Trending quotes

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Henry David Thoreau: 770 quotes96 likes

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

Henry David Thoreau

Source: I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

Henry David Thoreau

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

Henry David Thoreau

Source: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

Henry David Thoreau

Variant: Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Source: Walden and Other Writings

“All good things are wild and free.”

Henry David Thoreau

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

Henry David Thoreau

Variant: It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

Henry David Thoreau

August 19, 1851
Journals (1838-1859)
Variant: How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours … In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Commonly misquoted, converted to imperative mood, as "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler".
Walden (1854)

“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.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Men are born to succeed, not to fail.”

Henry David Thoreau

“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.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden