Famous Quotes

Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

• It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
• Live the life you've dreamed.
• Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
• Make the most of your regrets never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
• Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
• May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!
• Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
• Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
• Men have become the tools of their tools.
• Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
• Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
• Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
• Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
• Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
• Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
• No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.
• None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
• Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.
• Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
• Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
• Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
• Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
• Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
• Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
• Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
• Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
• Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
• Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
• That government is best which governs least.
• The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
• The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
• 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.
• The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
• The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
• The language of friendship is not words but meanings.