Henry David Thoreau Life Quotations [Page 2]

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.

The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.

Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?

Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.

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

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature -if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you -know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

Still we live meanly like ants, though the fable tells us we were long ago changed into men.

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again."

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry,-determine to make a day of it.

If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him . . he will be surrounded by grandeur.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

My life is like a stroll upon the beach.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

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

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.

No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.

Live in each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.

Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.

Do not despair of your life. You have force enough to overcome your obstacles.

One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.

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

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

Our thoughts are epochs in our lives; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blow while we are here.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Waves of a serene life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather.

We live but a fraction of our lives.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!....

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Your religion is where your love is.

If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

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 according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.

In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.