Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)

Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) was a 19th-century American writer, naturalist, and philosopher. He was also an anti-slavery activist, a transcendentalist, and a passionate advocate of self-sufficiency and individualism.

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, studied at Harvard and apprenticed at his father’s pencil workshop. He did not like his next job as a schoolteacher because he didn’t want to dispense corporal punishment on his students. He then developed a friendship with his benefactor, the essayist and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered him a substitute family and a springboard to a life of letters.

Thoreau was also a champion of the simple life, a lover of nature, and an opponent of the modern. In his seminal work, Walden; or, A Life in the Woods (1854,) he made a show of back-to-the-earth living during a two-year-two-month-and-two-day period when he holed up in a tiny log cabin on the edge of a pond in the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts. There, far away from society, he sought solitude to discover the simple, yet revolutionary answers to the meaning of life.

On one occasion, Thoreau spent a night in prison for refusing to pay taxes to a government that approved slavery and pursued an imperialist war against Mexico. Based on this encounter, he wrote Civil Disobedience debating that individual conscience takes precedence over political expediency. His evocation of passive resistance in this influential essay motivated peacemakers and writers alike—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr., W. B. Yeats, and Leo Tolstoy. His work also stimulated such reformist movements as prison reform, universal suffrage, abolitionism, and environmentalism.

Thoreau developed a penchant for Hinduism and yoga. He died in 1862 at age 44 before receiving any approbation for his writing and its global influence. His simple philosophy on learning from nature has inspired many ecological and environmental movements. Walden is taught in schools and is read meticulously by green-leaning people around the world.

Thoreau is one of America’s most quoted writers.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Henry David Thoreau

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

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