Walden, or Life in the Woods Quotes

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that 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, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“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

“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, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“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

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“My greatest skill in life has been to want but little”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“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.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“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”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“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.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“and 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, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night... All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“Sometimes, in a summer morning,
having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise
till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,
in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or
flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at
my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant
highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons
like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the
hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but
so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals
mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I
minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some
work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing
memorable is accomplished.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that 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. ... 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, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“I wanted to live deep and suck out the all the marrow of life (...).”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“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. Nature is well adapted to our weakness as our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods