A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
Henry David Thoreau
Friendship Quotes
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Henry David Thoreau
How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
Henry David Thoreau
The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.
Henry David Thoreau
Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.
Henry David Thoreau
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
Henry David Thoreau
To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, the impression of inward comfort and Sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature's English comfort.
Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.
Henry David Thoreau
Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Henry David Thoreau
Love Quotes
Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
Henry David Thoreau
Goodness is the only investment which never fails.
Henry David Thoreau
Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.
Henry David Thoreau
You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.
Henry David Thoreau
Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.
Henry David Thoreau
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.