Henry David Thoreau Quotes to Live By

The reason we love Thoreau is because of his thirst for freedom, social justice and philosophy and his true love for nature and humanity.

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Henry David Thoreau Short Quotes

Original Photo by Timothy Dykes

• All good things are wild and free.
• We are constantly invited to be what we are.
• There is no remedy for love but to love more.

• If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
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• What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
• Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
• Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
• Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Original Photo by Simon Matzinger

• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
• Men have become the tools of their tools.
• I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
• Wildness is the preservation of the World.
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• The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.
• What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?

• I make myself rich by making my wants few.
• An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
• Things do not change; we change.
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• Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
• Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
• Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
• The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

• …for my greatest skill has been to want but little.
• 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.
• Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
• This world is but canvas to our imagination.
• Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

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• 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.
• The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.
• The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
• Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
• 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.
• It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Original Photo by Nathan Dumlao

• Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
• Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
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• A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

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

 

Henry David Thoreau Quotes about Life

• I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
• I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that 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.
• We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.
• Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

• As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
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• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..
• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

• Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

• If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
• It is never too late to give up your prejudices
• It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
• Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

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

• Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
• As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
• The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.
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• On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

Original Photo by Ahmed Rizkhaan

• When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
• That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
• A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
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• I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
• Renew thyself completely each day.

Original Photo by William Bayreuther

• It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.
• If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth–certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

 

Henry David Thoreau Quotes about Nature

• This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.
• Friends… they cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams.
• Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.
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• We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
• The universe is wider than our views of it.
• I have a room all to myself; it is nature.
• 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.

• To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
• Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
• When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here – the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country… Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all it’s warriors…I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.
  
• 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 Inspirational Quotes

• I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.
• If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. what demon possessed me that i behaved so well?
  
• In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
• Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
• 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.
• Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
• The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

• I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
• I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
• Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
• I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite – only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.
• If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

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• Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.
• Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
• What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
• You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
• And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, – we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?

• Life in us is like the water in a river.
• 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. Henry David Thoreau
• It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak and another to hear.
• While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.

• 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.
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• The heart is forever inexperienced.
• It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town… he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety. Henry David Thoreau
• If you want to be happy, be!

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• All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
• 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?
• Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.
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• Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
• 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 he hears, however measured or far away.
• It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
• The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.

Original Photo by Charles S.

Henry David Thoreau Long Quotes

• In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
• We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
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• 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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…

Original Photo by Tobias Mrzyk

• Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, ‘I will simply 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.
• One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
• I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.
• All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

Original Photo by Samuel Scrimshaw

• Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
• Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.
• Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.
• All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obli­gation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

• As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.
• A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
• The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
• 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? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?

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Famous Books by and about Henry David Thoreau

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Walden and Civil Disobedience. Henry David Thoreau.

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