Henry David Thoreau
American essayist and naturalist, 1817-1862
74 quotes.
Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
- Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
- Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.
- My greatest skill has been to want little.
- Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace.
- Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.
- One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors; for to dwell long upon them is to add to the offense... Not to grieve long for any action, but to go immediately and do freshly and otherwise, subtracts so much from the wrong.
- Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
- Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
- Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
- Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
- 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... Simplify, simplify.
- So behave that the odour of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.
- 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.
- The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
- The heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high.
- The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
- The only way to tell the truth is to speak it with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard.
- The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
- The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
- The true laborer is recompensed by his labor, not by his employer.
- There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
- Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
- There is never but one opportunity of a kind.
- There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
- To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
- To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
- Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.
- We underpin our houses with granite; what of our habits and our lives?
- What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
- Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? 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, however measured or far away.
- You must get your living by loving, else your life is at least half a failure.
- You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
- I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
- What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.