Henry David Thoreau Quotes

• Henry David Thoreau Motivational Quotes
• Quotes on Life by Henry David Thoreau
• Henry David Thoreau Quotes about Self Respect
• Henry David Thoreau Quotes about Opportunity
• Quotes on Mother by Henry David Thoreau
• Quotes about Adventure by Henry David Thoreau
• Henry David Thoreau Friendship Quotes
• Quotes on Trust and True Love by Henry David Thoreau
• Henry David Thoreau Time Quotes
• Quotes on Future by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau Motivational Quotes

Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

Henry David Thoreau

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

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

Henry David Thoreau

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Henry David Thoreau

When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.

Henry David Thoreau

Quotes on Life by Henry David Thoreau

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

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

Live in each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.

Henry David Thoreau

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Henry David Thoreau

One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.

Henry David Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreau

Sweep away the clutter of things that complicate our lives.

Henry David Thoreau

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Henry David Thoreau

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

To be awake is to be alive.

Henry David Thoreau

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Henry David Thoreau

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau Quotes about Self Respect

For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.

Henry David Thoreau

I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect…always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.

Henry David Thoreau

If I am not I, who will be?

Henry David Thoreau

Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau Quotes about Opportunity

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

Henry David Thoreau

Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.

Henry David Thoreau

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

Henry David Thoreau

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.

Henry David Thoreau

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Henry David Thoreau

There never is but one opportunity of a kind.

Henry David Thoreau

Quotes on Mother by Henry David Thoreau

Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return-prepared to send beck our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, and wife and child and friends and never see them again,-if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled your affairs and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

Henry David Thoreau

If Nature is our mother, then God is our father.

Henry David Thoreau

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.

Henry David Thoreau

The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.

Henry David Thoreau

Quotes about Adventure by Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

Henry David Thoreau

My themes will not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures.

Henry David Thoreau

Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.

Henry David Thoreau

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Henry David Thoreau

The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours … but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

Henry David Thoreau

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau Friendship Quotes

A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no otherlaw nor kindness.

Henry David Thoreau

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Henry David Thoreau

Faint heart never won true friend. O my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend I may be yours.

Henry David Thoreau

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

Henry David Thoreau

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

Henry David Thoreau

Quotes on Trust and True Love by Henry David Thoreau

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.

Henry David Thoreau

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

Henry David Thoreau

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Henry David Thoreau

A sufficiently great and generous trust could never be abused.

Henry David Thoreau

Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

Henry David Thoreau

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

Henry David Thoreau

I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.

Henry David Thoreau

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow.

Henry David Thoreau

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau Time Quotes

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Henry David Thoreau

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Henry David Thoreau

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times.

Henry David Thoreau

Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.

Henry David Thoreau

We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.

Henry David Thoreau

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

Henry David Thoreau

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Henry David Thoreau

Quotes on Future by Henry David Thoreau

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one… characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

Henry David Thoreau

I have not the most definite designs on the future.

Henry David Thoreau

If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies.

Henry David Thoreau

It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.

Henry David Thoreau

The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field.

Henry David Thoreau

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects.

Henry David Thoreau

Those who work much do not work hard.

Henry David Thoreau