Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Quotes

• 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.

• I have lived some thirty years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

• 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.

• Why should we be in such desperate haste 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. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

• Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

• Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

• It takes two to speak the truth--one to speak and the other to hear.

• The man for whom law exists - the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.

• Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.

• 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.

• Men have become the tools of their tools

• Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.

• Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.

• As if there were safety in stupidity alone.

• Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

• I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.

• What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.

• Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

• 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.

• It is never too late to give up your prejudices.