Henry David Thoreau Quotes

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.

Things do not change; we change.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

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

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.

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.

It's not worth our while to let our imperfections disturb us always.

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.

Simplify, simplify.

Life in us is like the water in a river.