Henry David
Thoreau Quotes
1817-1862
- Live
your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
- As
a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single
thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical
path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must
think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
- Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives,
because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any
continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.
- However mean
your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard
names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble
yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do
not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God
will see that you do want society.
- 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.
- There is no remedy for love but to love more.
- If...the
machine of government...is of
such a
nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another,
then, I
say, break the law.
- The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
- Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
- The mass of men lead
lives of quiet
desperation and
go to the grave with the song still in them.
- Do
not be too moral. You may cheat
yourself out of
much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for
something.
- It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
- Many men go fishing all of
their lives
without
knowing that it is not fish they are after.
- For
every ten people who are clipping at
the
branches of evil, you're lucky to find one who's hacking at the roots.
- In
times when the government imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a
just man is also the prison.
- Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.