Walden & Civil Disobedience Quotes

“I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
― Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Resistance to Civil Government

“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; may be you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods; On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience

“So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

—chapter 1, "Economy”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I love a broad margin to my life.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his 'furniture,' as whether it is insured or not. 'But what shall I do with my furniture?'...It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Flint's pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; — so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed — him all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I love to be alone. I have never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“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.

Aš manau, kad mes galėtume kur kas labiau pasitikėti gyvenimu. Mes galėtume taip pat mažiau rūpintis savimi kaip nuoširdžiai rūpinamės kitais.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

"Tarytum būtų galima užmušti laiką, nesužeidžiant amžinybės.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“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.

Viešoji nuomonė - ne toks baisus tironas kaip savoji. Tai, ką žmogus galvoja apie save, kaip tik ir lemia arba greičiau rodo jo likimą.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“La abundancia de una clase se compensa con la indigencia de la otra.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience

“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience