Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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

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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Life in us is like the water in a river.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

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

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.

"Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

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.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day.

If you want to be happy, be!