Famous Quotes

Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

• 'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.
• A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
• A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
• A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
• Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
• Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!
• All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
• All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
• An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
• As for doing good that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
• As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
• As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.
• As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
• Be not simply good - be good for something.
• Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
• Being is the great explainer.
• Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?
• Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.
• Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
• Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
• Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
• Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
• Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
• Faith never makes a confession.
• Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
• Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.
• Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
• God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.
• Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.
• Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
• How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
• I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
• I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
• I had three chairs in my house one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
• I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.