Henry David Thoreau Quotes on Life (52 Quotes)

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it.

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

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

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 you may feel your pulse.

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.

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

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

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

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.

What I have been preparing to say is this, in wildness is the preservation of the world ... Life consists of wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued by man, its presence refreshes him.... When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. In short, all good things are wild and free.

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.

Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die Discover that I had not lived.

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

In the streets and in society I am almost invariablycheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean.No amount of gold or respectability would in the leastredeem it,-- dining with the Governor or a member of CongressBut alone in the distant woods or fields,in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits,even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this,when a villager would be thinking of his inn,I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related,and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalentto what others get by churchgoing and prayer.I come home 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. I have told many that I walk every dayabout half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it.I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America,out of my head and be sane a part of every day.

My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life of Dr. Chalmers,which, however, I did not promise to do.Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard through the partitionshouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, 'Think of itHe stood half an hour today to hear the frogs croak,and he wouldn't read the life of Chalmers.'

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

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 tentoes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand insteadof a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

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

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 allowedfor, 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 agreat calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.

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

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.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails ... beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead.

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.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit not a fossil earth, but a living earth compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

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

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Live the life you've dreamed.

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

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

The only wealth is life.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms....

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

Our life is frittered away with detail.... Simplify, simplify.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.