Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
What you get by achieving your goals is to as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
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.
We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
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.
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
Law never made men a whit more just.
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts - a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.
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.
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
This observatory was a building of considerable size, erected by the students of Williamstown College, whose buildings might be seen by daylig...
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
The bluebird carries the sky on his back. Nature
Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
