Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Life in us is like the water in a river.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

The future is too soon the past. So make perseverance your excellence and go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

The dry grasses are not dead for me. A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another.

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.

My greatest skill has been to want but little.

No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.

What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?

Poverty ... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest.

In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.

I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.

He who parades his virtues seldom leads the parade. He who puts up with insult invites injury. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.