Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Quotes

• 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.

• I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

• 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 he hears, how ever measured or far away.

• A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

• 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.

• I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.

• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

• Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

• Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

• The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

• I'd rather sit alone on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

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

• 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.

• Many go fishing without knowing it is fish they are after.

• Things do not change; we change.

• Be not simply good - be good for something.

• In the long run, you hit only what you aim at: Therefore aim high.

• 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.

• In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

• Petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality.