Henry David Thoreau Quotes

American essayist, poet, and philosopher (1817–1862)

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Henry David Thoreau (12 July 1817 – 6 May 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

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Birth Name: David Henry Thoreau

Alternative Names: Thoreau • Henry D. Thoreau • Henry Thoreau

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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

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night... All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

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

But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.