Henry David Thoreau Quotes

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!

Men have become tools of their tools.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends…. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Be wary of any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right…Law never made man a whit more just.

They who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time accumulating property. The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it.

“Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.”

Be not simply good; be good for something.

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

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?

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