Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

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.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.

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.

It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.

Confucius said, To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

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. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day.

All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

If you want to be happy, be!

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? 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 which he hears, however measured or far away.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a spectulator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in a single, solitary, even humble individual. For it is within the soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.

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

In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.