Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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385 Quotes to Embrace the Present Moment and Lead a Meaningful Life

“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

“Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.”

“Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”

“I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.”

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

“A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors”

“Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.”

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

“To a philosopher all news is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”

“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.”

“We should impart our courage and not our despair.”

“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.”

“The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.”

“Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.”

“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 than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”

“Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.”

“If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.”

“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”

“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.”

“I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.”

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”

“Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.”

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”

“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.”

“If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.”

“Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.”

“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”

“Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare”

“Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.”

“I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

“He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.”

“Be not simply good; be good for something.”

“The perception of beauty is a moral test.”

“This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.”

“The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.”

“Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.”

“It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. … In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and "He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. … There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion.”

“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.”

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

“What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?”

“The rich man… is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.”

“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”

“In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about.”

“I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.”

“It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.”

“In the Catholic Church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.”