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Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.
~ Henry David Thoreau
We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.
~ Henry David Thoreau
A man may stand there [Cape Cod] and put all America behind him.
~ Henry David Thoreau
I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
~ Henry David Thoreau
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until the other is ready.
~ Henry David Thoreau
It is not enough to be busy... The question is: what are we busy about?
~ Henry David Thoreau
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.
~ Henry David Thoreau
be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.
~ Henry David Thoreau
It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
~ Henry David Thoreau
When a man dies he kicks the dust.
~ Henry David Thoreau
My friend is one who takes me for what I am.
~ Henry David Thoreau
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
~ Henry David Thoreau
I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
~ Henry David Thoreau
My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.
~ Henry David Thoreau
I am a happy camper so I guess I'm doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
~ Henry David Thoreau
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.
~ Henry David Thoreau
It's not worth our while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie.
~ Henry David Thoreau
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
~ Henry David Thoreau
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.
~ Henry David Thoreau
The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
~ Henry David Thoreau