Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.

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

The only remedy for love is to love more.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

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?

There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night... All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning.

Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. 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.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.