Henry David Thoreau Happiness Quotations

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.

I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.

I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.

Those undeserved joys which come uncalled and make us more pleased than grateful are they that sing.

What wisdom, what warning can prevail against gladness? There is no law so strong that a little gladness may not transgress.

I love the broad margin to my life.

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.

Things do not change; we change.

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

My greatest skill has been to want but little.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.