Henry David Thoreau - Life Quotes

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A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.

Henry David Thoreau
No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

Henry David Thoreau
We say justly that the weak person is flat, for, like all flat substances, he does not stand in the direction of his strength, that is, on his edge, but affords a convenient surface to put upon. He slides all the way through life.... But the brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side and is equally strong every way.

Henry David Thoreau
Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moonnor firefly has shown me the causeway to it.

Henry David Thoreau
How many a poor immortal soul I have met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it [an oversized home].

Henry David Thoreau
There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

Henry David Thoreau
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Henry David Thoreau
I have tasted but little bread in my life. It has been mere grub and provender for the most part. Of bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any. There is absolutely none on the tables even of the rich.

Henry David Thoreau
The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

Henry David Thoreau
What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.

Henry David Thoreau
There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.

Henry David Thoreau
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.

Henry David Thoreau
Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

Henry David Thoreau
What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

Henry David Thoreau
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.

Henry David Thoreau
A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

Henry David Thoreau
Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward habitually at an elevated angle, it is as if it were redeemed. When the desire to be better than we are is really sincere we are instantly elevated, and so far better already.

Henry David Thoreau
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky.

Henry David Thoreau
Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.

Henry David Thoreau
That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline.

Henry David Thoreau
What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

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

Henry David Thoreau
Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.

Henry David Thoreau
Plainly the fox belongs to a different order of things from that which reigns in the village. Our courts, though they offer a bounty for his hide, and our pulpits, though they draw many a moral from his cunning, are in few senses contemporary with his free forest life.

Henry David Thoreau
If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry - all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth.

Henry David Thoreau
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Henry David Thoreau
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

Henry David Thoreau
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreau
We can never have enough of nature…We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Henry David Thoreau
Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

Henry David Thoreau