Henry David Thoreau - Quotes - Nature, Freedom, Liberty

The poverty that enjoys true wealth.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

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

There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.

What you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, and then we can hardly see anything else.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.