Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

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

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

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.

What exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and morals.

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.

We 've wholly forgotten how to die. But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when to end.

Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.

It must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses; and the brute degenerates in man's society.

Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life.

It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.

Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world?

Work your vein till it is exhausted, or conducts you to a broader one.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.

It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.