Henry David Thoreau Quotes

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that 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.”

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.”

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

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

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

“Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”

“Things do not change; we change.”

“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.”

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

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

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

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

“For my greatest skill has been to want but little.”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

“Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.”

“Unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”

“Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”

“He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.”

“What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

“In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”

“I heartily accept the motto, — ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.”

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

“Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

“The practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.”

“If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”

“Oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!”

“The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.”

“A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.”

“Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.”

“It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.”

“The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.”

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?”

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.”

“Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath.”

“You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;”

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”

“We may safely trust a good deal more than we do.”

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

“To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

“The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.”

“When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all—looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck—I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry.”

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

“An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.”

“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.”

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance...”

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

“The symbol of an ancient man’ s thought becomes a modern man’ s speech.”

“This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.”

“How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heaven and of Earth!”

“We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction.”

“Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous.”

“The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.”

“Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher’s desk.”

“Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”

“No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our lakes receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where ‘still the shore’ a ‘brave attempt resounds.‘”

“one looks, and one does not see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one does not know the savor of food.”

“Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead.”

“A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled.

“In like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them.”

“Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

“I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.”

“That government is best which governs not at all;”

“I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.”

“In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”

“A man has not every thing to do, but something; and because he cannot do every thing, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.”

“For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done for ever.”

“If a State is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a State is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.”

“I was not born to be forced.”