Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.

It's circumstantial evidence, like finding a trout in the milk.

If ever I was sure that someone was coming to help me, I should run like hell.

The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns, — a sort of fucus or lichen in bone, — to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

It is hard to forget that which it is worse than useless to remember.

But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted.

Even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. We do not wish for Friends to feed and clothe our bodies, -neighbors are kind enough for that, -but to do the like office to our spirits. For this few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.

Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.

If I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.

In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing. Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses

I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around. Nothing can be more useful to a man than the determination not to be hurried.

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government

Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.

One chair for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.