Quotes from Henry David Thoreau


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Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.


True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.


Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.


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.


Goodness is the only investment that never fails.


We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.


Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.


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.


Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.


Men are born to succeed, not to fail.


If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.


It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.


If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.


Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.


Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.


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.


Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.


Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.


As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.


I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.