Henry David Thoreau Quotes
"If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there are night owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business." - from a letter - Henry David Thoreau
"Hell itself may be contained within the compass of a spark." (source) - Henry David Thoreau
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." - A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Henry David Thoreau
"Thank God, man cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! We are safe on that side for the present." - (source) - Henry David Thoreau
"Our life is frittered away by detail...simplify, simplify." - Henry David Thoreau
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." - (source) - Henry David Thoreau
"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor." - Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau
"For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it." - Henry David Thoreau
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
"The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings." - A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Henry David Thoreau
"For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms and did my duty faithfully." - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
"The sun is but a morning star." - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand." - Henry David Thoreau
"What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?." - Thoreau Journal 9 - Henry David Thoreau
"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion." - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
You can find many more quotes by Thoreau on the Henry D. Thoreau Quotations section of walden.org.
