Henry David Thoreau citations et citations

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

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

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

The secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in the mind

By turns, our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.

The night is certainly more novel and less profane than a day.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

To be awake is to be alive.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?