Henry David Thoreau, Walden Quotes
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.
Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.
If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.
Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.
The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.
The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.
that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.
Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!
A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will.
We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.
Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.