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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal,...

Henry David Thoreau

This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?

Henry David Thoreau

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that t...

Henry David Thoreau

It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; ...

Henry David Thoreau

I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes a-foot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles, the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wage. I remember when wages were sixty cents...

Henry David Thoreau

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they e...

Henry David Thoreau

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cu...

Henry David Thoreau

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are onl...

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

Henry David Thoreau

God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.

Henry David Thoreau

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.

Henry David Thoreau

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

Henry David Thoreau

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Henry David Thoreau

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

Henry David Thoreau

There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony.

Henry David Thoreau

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which co...

Henry David Thoreau

Men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.

Henry David Thoreau

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.

Henry David Thoreau

God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds u...

Henry David Thoreau

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and ...

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