Henry David Thoreau
148 quotations
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?
The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
There is no remedy for love than to love more.
Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
Of what significance are the things you can forget.
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.
Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.
The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.
The only wealth is life.
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
Don't be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.
The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.
Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?
Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.
Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.