Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

If then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become of the worthies of the world.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

I think that we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.

This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.

lET HIM MARCH TO THE MUSIC HE HEARS

Keep pace with the drummer you hear, however measured or far away.

No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

How silent are the footsteps of Spring!

The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experiences. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.

What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers?

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

There is no life but this.

Do not engage to find things as you think they are.

Alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself. I once more feel myself grandly related. This cold and solitude are friends of mine.

After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

To the SICK the doctors wisely recommed a change of air and scenery

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves...The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men and so with the paths which the mind travels.

Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth.