Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.

I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through purer stratum. It rIses on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far stratum in the sky.

Spring is brown; summer, green; autumn, yellow; winter, white; November, gray.

That nation is not Christian where the principles of humanity do not prevail, but the prejudices of race.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.

Life in us is like the water in a river.

To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life... that were worth the postage.

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

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

There is no more Herculean task than to think a thought about this life and then get it expressed.

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.