Henry David Thoreau Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Any fool can make a ruleAnd any fool will mind it. Journal #14

2. As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. Walden

3. Confucious said, To know what we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge. Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

4. I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. Life Without Principle

5. I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

6. I have known such joys the likes of which might have inspired a Homer or a Shakespeare.

7. I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. Walden

8. I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

9. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. 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. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. Walden

10. It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

11. It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

12. It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.

13. Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

14. Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

15. Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

16. Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

17. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. Walden

18. Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

19. The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

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

21. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. Walden

22. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Walden

23. As for Doing-good,that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried itfairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agreewith my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberatelyforsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands ofme, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a likebut infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preservesit. Walden

24. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

25. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. Walden

26. Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

27. He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.

28. 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. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. Walden

29. I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. The Journal, 1837-1861

30. If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau