Famous Quotes Online - Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau

Do not lose hold of your dreams or asprirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Live the life you've dreamed... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Our life is frittered away by detail ... simplify, simplify.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
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 have not lived.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
City life is millions of people being lonesome together.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
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 {view}
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... Henry David Thoreau {view}
What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched... Henry David Thoreau {view}
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
If you give money, spend yourself with it.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
In the streets and in society I am almost invariablycheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean.No amount of gold or respectability would in the leastredeem it,-- dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!!But alone in the distant woods or fields,in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits,even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this,when a villager would be thinking of his inn,I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related,and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalentto what others get by churchgoing and prayer.I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are,grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every dayabout half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it.I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America,out of my head and be sane a part of every day.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone... I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain - I find no sea room - but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident - It is as common as life.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages... Henry David Thoreau {view}
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
All men recognize the right of revolution... Henry David Thoreau {view}
We falsely attribute to men a determined character -- putting together all their yesterdays -- and averaging them -- we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support -- it is worse than a large family -- he is the silent poor indeed.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him... Henry David Thoreau {view}
That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream-world into reality.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.... Henry David Thoreau {view}
I belive that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.... Henry David Thoreau {view}