Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

What a man thinks of himself that is what determines, or rather indicates his fate.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products ancient and venerable familes known to antiquity as to modern times of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on

What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, this is no other life but this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.