Henry David Thoreau quotes

1817–1862 · Concord, MA

• No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

• Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

• To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

• To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

• I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

• Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

• Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

• …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.

• 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 in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

• 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.

• However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.

• Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

• Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

• I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

• 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.

• 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.

• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.