Henry David Thoreau
148 quotations
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.
You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
The heart is forever inexperienced.
Being is the great explainer.
Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.
The eye is the jewel of the body.
Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.
Even the best things are not equal to their fame.
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
People die of fright and live of confidence.
One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.
The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.
We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend.
A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.