Find a Quote of Henry David Thoreau

-All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

-As if we could kill time without injuring eternity!

-Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

-Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

-Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

-I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

-I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

-I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

-If a man walks 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 days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

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

-It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

-Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

-Men have become the tools of their tools.

-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.

-None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

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

-Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

-Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

-The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

-The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

-The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

-The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

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

-Things do not change; we change.

-Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

-What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

-What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

-What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?