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
Topics: Future
Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Advice, Disease
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Literature, Books, Reading
It’s only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: God, Faith, Divinity
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Wisdom
Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Doubt
Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Ideal, Thoughts, Thought
Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Law, Lawyers
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.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Values
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. 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
Topics: Day, Carpe-diem
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Saints, Manners
The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not, within the scope of mind science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Wilderness
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Thoughts, Thought
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Blessings, Wealth, Leadership, Rich, Appreciation, Gratitude
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Thoughts, Reason, Thought
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. 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. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Simplicity
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Attention, Technology, Science
Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Walking
It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Women
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Time, Value of Time, Time Management, Waste, Carpe-diem
Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Music
What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Action
Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Knowledge
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Literature, Book, Books, Reading
The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Money
The stars are the apexes of what triangles!
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Fame
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Vision, Ability, Ambition, Expectation, Doing Your Best, Life
Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Innocence
If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Vanity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson American Philosopher
- Amos Bronson Alcott American Teacher
- Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
- John Cage American Composer
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Walt Whitman American Poet
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Kahlil Gibran Lebanese-born American Philosopher
- Will Durant American Historian
- George Santayana Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
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