Quotes from Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.

Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.

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

All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!

I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.

The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.

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.

Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

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.

Little is to be expected of that day... to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells...

After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs, rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning... Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me... To be awake is to be alive.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life...

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.