Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours...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.

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.

I was born upon thy bank, river, My blood flows in thy stream, And thou meanderest forever At the bottom of my dream.

There is no beginning too small.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, - and then we can hardly see anything else.

Let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world.

the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them? that it was a vain endeavor?

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.

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

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

It has come to this, that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow.

Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

Cowards suffer, heroes enjoy.