Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) quotes

• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
• Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
• All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
• All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
• Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.
• Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
• Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant.
• Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
• Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.
• Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.
• Faith never makes a confession.
• I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.
• I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
• If a man walks in the woods for the love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
• If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious of doing me good, I should run for my life.
• If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
• If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
• 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.
• It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
• It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
• It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe in the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
• It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
• It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
• It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
• It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.
• It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
• It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
• It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
• It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
• Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
• Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
• Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
• None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiam.
• Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
• Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
• Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
• Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
• The greatest compliment that was ever paid to me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
• The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
• The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
• The universe is wider than our views of it.
• There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
• Things do not change; we change.
• Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.
• What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
• What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
• What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?