Henry David Thoreau

Live the life you've dreamed
Henry David Thoreau

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
Henry David Thoreau

The heart is forever inexperienced.
Henry David Thoreau

We are constantly invited to be who we are.
Henry David Thoreau

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.
Henry David Thoreau

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.
Henry David Thoreau

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.
Henry David Thoreau

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

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.
Henry David Thoreau

Humility like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights.
Henry David Thoreau

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.
Henry David Thoreau

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
Henry David Thoreau

In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.
Henry David Thoreau

The sun is but a morning star.
Henry David Thoreau

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?
Henry David Thoreau

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
Henry David Thoreau

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.
Henry David Thoreau

We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.
Henry David Thoreau

I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Henry David Thoreau

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
Henry David Thoreau

We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.
Henry David Thoreau

One farmer says to me, ''You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;'' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
Henry David Thoreau

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 infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
Henry David Thoreau

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.
Henry David Thoreau

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

Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.
Henry David Thoreau

I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance! it depends on how you are yarded.
Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.
Henry David Thoreau

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

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau

There is no remedy for love than to love more.
Henry David Thoreau

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families 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

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

It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
Henry David Thoreau

A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Henry David Thoreau

The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
Henry David Thoreau

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
Henry David Thoreau

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
Henry David Thoreau

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Henry David Thoreau

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
Henry David Thoreau

Of what significance are the things you can forget.
Henry David Thoreau

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.
Henry David Thoreau

So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
Henry David Thoreau

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?
Henry David Thoreau

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau

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. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner… to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.
Henry David Thoreau

Pity the man who has a character to support --it is worse than a large family -- he is silent poor indeed.
Henry David Thoreau

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.
Henry David Thoreau