Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

“Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify.”

Henry David Thoreau
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“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau
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“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Henry David Thoreau
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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Henry David Thoreau
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“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Henry David Thoreau
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“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end… We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

Henry David Thoreau
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“In the long run men hit only what they aim at.”

Henry David Thoreau
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“Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.”

Henry David Thoreau
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“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!”

Henry David Thoreau
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“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

Henry David Thoreau
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