Henry David Thoreau - Walden (1854)

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If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

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

Henry David Thoreau
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious effort.

Henry David Thoreau
Once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean-field,--effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say,--and devour him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher.

Henry David Thoreau
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.

Henry David Thoreau
As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.

Henry David Thoreau
The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.

Henry David Thoreau
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Henry David Thoreau
In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.

Henry David Thoreau
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Their authors are a natural irresistible aristocracy in every society, and more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Henry David Thoreau
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.

Henry David Thoreau
Our molting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives.

Henry David Thoreau
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Henry David Thoreau
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

Henry David Thoreau
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Henry David Thoreau
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Henry David Thoreau
The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Henry David Thoreau
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

Henry David Thoreau
It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

Henry David Thoreau
Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Henry David Thoreau
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.

Henry David Thoreau
Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

Henry David Thoreau
Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Henry David Thoreau
It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

Henry David Thoreau
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

Henry David Thoreau
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

Henry David Thoreau
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

Henry David Thoreau
And the cost of a thing, it will be remembered, is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

Henry David Thoreau