Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined!

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

This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

We live but a fraction of our lives

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I have not lived.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Life does not require us to make good; it asks only that we give our best at each level of experience.

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll go canoeing.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.

A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.