WORDS OF WISDOM

Henry David Thoreau

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

I was determined to know beans.

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live accordingly to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

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.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature -- daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it -- rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

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.

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

It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth.

Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.

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.

Fire is the most tolerable third party.

I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be in Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

As if there were safety in stupidity alone.

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.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison.

A man may stand there [Cape Cod] and put all America behind him.

As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere.

It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

One world at a time. (Said a few days before his death)

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

When a man dies he kicks the dust.

As for doing good, that is one of the professions which are full.

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

It is a great art to saunter.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

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

So we defend ourselves and our henroosts, and maintain slavery.

The fate of the country . . . does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison...the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

I have traveled a good deal in Concord.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Even the death of friends will inspire us as much as their lives...Their memories will be encrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our friends have no place in the graveyard.

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

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.

Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

They [wood stumps] warmed me twice -- once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire.

Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplify, Simplify.

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

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

I love a broad margin to my life.

It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

The vessel, though her masts be firm,
Beneath her copper bears a worm.