Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Quotes

• Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

• Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

• Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

• Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined.

• To believe your own thought: To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.

• When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.

• Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

• 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.

• Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

• If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

• It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.

• You can not percieve beauty but with a serene mind.

• Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

• The light that puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

• Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

• But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

• Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

• Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

• When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes-- remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education-- make them hunters.

• We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.