Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.

When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.

Gnaw your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, gnaw it still.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.

The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.

Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. ... Simplify, simplify.

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.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rain-storms and did my duty faithfully.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imaged, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

City life - millions of people being lonesome together.

He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life.

It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

We like that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.