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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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How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.
Henry David Thoreau
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Henry David Thoreau
The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
Henry David Thoreau
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
Henry David Thoreau
I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
Henry David Thoreau
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
The heart is forever inexperienced.
Henry David Thoreau
Faith never makes a confession.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
Henry David Thoreau
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
Henry David Thoreau
What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.
Henry David Thoreau
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
Henry David Thoreau
There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor.
Henry David Thoreau
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
Henry David Thoreau
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
Henry David Thoreau
The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?
Henry David Thoreau
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.
Henry David Thoreau
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
Henry David Thoreau
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
Henry David Thoreau
Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Henry David Thoreau
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Henry David Thoreau
Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau
Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.
Henry David Thoreau
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.
Henry David Thoreau
There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.
Henry David Thoreau
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
Henry David Thoreau
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
Henry David Thoreau
Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Henry David Thoreau
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
Henry David Thoreau
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
Henry David Thoreau
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Henry David Thoreau
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
Henry David Thoreau
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau