quotes by Henry David Thoreau

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. "
— Henry David Thoreau

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
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— Henry David Thoreau

"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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms. "
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the inheritance of generations and nations."
— Henry David Thoreau

"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. "
— Henry David Thoreau

"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake"
— Henry David Thoreau

"Be not simply good. Be good for something."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. "
— Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience And Other Essays the Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau)

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Other Writings)

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
— 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

"Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. "
— 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.



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— Henry David Thoreau

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

"There is no remedy for love, but to love more."
— Henry David Thoreau

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

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— Henry David Thoreau

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. "
— Henry David Thoreau