Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.

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.

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.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

What is once well done is done forever.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Being is the great explainer.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.

Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.

Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.

It is the stars as not yet known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.

What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.

I am amused to see from my window here how busily a man has divided and staked off his domain. God must smile at his puny fences running hither and thither everywhere over the land.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.