Henry David Thoreau Quotes

1817-1862

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
If...the machine of government...is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
For every ten people who are clipping at the branches of evil, you're lucky to find one who's hacking at the roots.
In times when the government imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also the prison.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.