Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

About Henry David Thoreau:

Henry David Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
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I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Henry David Thoreau

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Henry David Thoreau

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Henry David Thoreau

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

Henry David Thoreau

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

Henry David Thoreau
Art quotes by Henry David Thoreau, Imagination quotes by Henry David Thoreau, UberQuotes

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

Henry David Thoreau

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your chu...

Henry David Thoreau

Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here - the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emas...

Henry David Thoreau

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.

Henry David Thoreau

The spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. Ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living wave, — a vital spot on the lake's surface, — lau...

Henry David Thoreau

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 ...

Henry David Thoreau

In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.

Henry David Thoreau

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Henry David Thoreau

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is chea...

Henry David Thoreau

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were worki...

Henry David Thoreau

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” [ ; November 16, 1857]

Henry David Thoreau

I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

Henry David Thoreau

Author Bio

  • NameHenry David Thoreau
  • Description1817-1862 American author, abolitionist, naturalist
  • BornJuly 12, 1817
  • DiedMay 6, 1862
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Philosopher; Essayist; Autobiographer