Henry David Thoreau Quotes - Famous Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Born: 1817-07-12
Died: 1862-05-06
Henry David Thoreau Biography
A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. - from Live Without Principle
- Henry David Thoreau
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A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
- Henry David Thoreau
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A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.
- Henry David Thoreau
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A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.
- Henry David Thoreau
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A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
- Henry David Thoreau
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All good things are wild, and free.
- Henry David Thoreau
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All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy we reason from our hands to our head.
- Henry David Thoreau
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All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Arthur Schopenhauer Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
- Henry David Thoreau
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As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
- Henry David Thoreau
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As if there were safety in stupidity alone.
- Henry David Thoreau
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As if we could kill time without injuring eternity!
- Henry David Thoreau
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Be not simply good - be good for something.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Faint heart never won true friend. O my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend I may be yours.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Government never furthered any enterprise but the alacrity with which it got out of the way.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.
- Henry David Thoreau
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He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Heroes are often the most ordinary of men.
- Henry David Thoreau
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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
- Henry David Thoreau
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How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
- Henry David Thoreau
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How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!
- Henry David Thoreau
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How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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 the richest.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake his neighbors up.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which these things would be by me unavoidable.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I have learned this at least by my experiment that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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
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I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the braver every in a majority
- Henry David Thoreau
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I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, cattle, barns, and farming tools, for these are more easily acquired than gotten rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I stand in awe of my body.
- Henry David Thoreau
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I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
- Henry David Thoreau
More quotations on: [ Business ] ***
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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.
- Henry David Thoreau
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If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated
- Henry David Thoreau
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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.
- Henry David Thoreau
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If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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.
- Henry David Thoreau
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If the day and the night are such that you greet them with with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your success.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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.
- Henry David Thoreau
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If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.
- Henry David Thoreau
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In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.
- Henry David Thoreau
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In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.
- Henry David Thoreau
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In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
- Henry David Thoreau
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In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions know that you are alone in the world.
- Henry David Thoreau
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In wildness is the preservation of the world. - from Walking
- Henry David Thoreau
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It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau
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It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
- Henry David Thoreau
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It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
- Henry David Thoreau
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It is not enough to be busy the question is what are we busy about
- Henry David Thoreau
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It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
- Henry David Thoreau
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It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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.
- Henry David Thoreau
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It takes two to speak truth - One to speak, and another to hear.
- Henry David Thoreau
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It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Live each season as it passes breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Make the most of your regrets. . . . To regret deeply is to live afresh.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Men have become the tools of their tools.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life
- Henry David Thoreau
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My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.
- Henry David Thoreau
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None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
- Henry David Thoreau
More quotations on: [ Old Age ] ***
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.
- Henry David Thoreau
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One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
- Henry David Thoreau
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Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make-Believe!
- Henry David Thoreau
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Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
- Henry David Thoreau
More quotations on: [ Success ] ***
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
- Henry David Thoreau
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That government is best which governs least. - from Civil Disobedience
- Henry David Thoreau
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That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
- Henry David Thoreau
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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.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The cost of a things is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought , and attended to my answer.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The man for whom law exists -- the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
- Henry David Thoreau
More quotations on: [ Teamwork ] ***
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible And indescribably as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, A segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. - from Live Without Principle
- Henry David Thoreau
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The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
- Henry David Thoreau
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There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at its root.
- Henry David Thoreau
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There are now-a-days professors of philosophy but not philosophers.
- Henry David Thoreau
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There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. - from Live Without Principle
- Henry David Thoreau
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There is no remedy for love but to love more.
- Henry David Thoreau
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There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Things do not change; we change.
- Henry David Thoreau
More quotations on: [ Change ] ***
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
- Henry David Thoreau
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To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
- Henry David Thoreau
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To affect the quality of the day that is the art of life.
- Henry David Thoreau
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To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
- Henry David Thoreau
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To reget deeply is to live afresh.
- Henry David Thoreau
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True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.
- Henry David Thoreau,
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Water is the only drink for a wise man.
- Henry David Thoreau
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We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
- Henry David Thoreau
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We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.
- Henry David Thoreau
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We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be. -- from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
- Henry David Thoreau
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We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
- Henry David Thoreau
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We falsely attribute to men a determined character - putting together all their yesterdays - and averaging them - we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support - it is worse than a large family - he is the silent poor indeed.
- Henry David Thoreau
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We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.
- Henry David Thoreau
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We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
- Henry David Thoreau
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We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
- Henry David Thoreau
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We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What a man thinks of himself that is what determines, or rather indicates his fate.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What does education often do It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What is a country without rabbits and partridges They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products ancient and venerable familes known to antiquity as to modern times of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
- Henry David Thoreau
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What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
- Henry David Thoreau
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What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.
- Henry David Thoreau
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When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
- Henry David Thoreau
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When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.
- Henry David Thoreau
More quotations on: [ Language ] ***
Why should we be in such desperate hast to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
- Henry David Thoreau
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Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitiches today to save nine tomorrow.
- Henry David Thoreau
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You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, this is no other life but this.
- Henry David Thoreau
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