Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 and died in 1862, but not without leaving his mark on the world. A philosopher and author, his quotes have become some of the most famous and insightful in history. They reflect his beliefs and paint a picture of the life philosophy he lived by. His words are often cited as an inspiration for environmentalists, minimalists, and anyone looking to simplify their life.
He is most well-known for his book Walden, in which he recounts two years he spent living in a cabin near Walden Pond. In this book and his other writings, Thoreau examines topics such as civil disobedience, self-reliance, and simplicity. His words are just as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them.
Here is a list of our favorite Thoreau quotes that will make you think differently about the world around you.
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
Simplify your life. Don’t waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don’t burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple and enjoy what you have. Don’t destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past. Live in the present. Simplify!
Henry David Thoreau
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined…
Henry David Thoreau
Life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself. So live the life you imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
To have made even one person’s life a little better, that is to succeed.
Henry David Thoreau
Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.
Henry David Thoreau
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Henry David Thoreau
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.
Henry David Thoreau
I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
Henry David Thoreau
The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.
Henry David Thoreau
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
Henry David Thoreau
Everyone must believe in something. I believe I’ll go canoeing.
Henry David Thoreau
I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.
Henry David Thoreau
And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.
Henry David Thoreau
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
Henry David Thoreau
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
Henry David Thoreau
Let nothing come between you and the light.
Henry David Thoreau
Kindness to children, love for children, goodness to children– these are the only investments that never fail.
Henry David Thoreau
The secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in mind.
Henry David Thoreau
What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Henry David Thoreau
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau
We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain.
Henry David Thoreau
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
When we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.
Henry David Thoreau
City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
Henry David Thoreau
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
Henry David Thoreau
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not despair of your life. You have force enough to overcome your obstacles.
Henry David Thoreau
Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.
Henry David Thoreau
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
All good things are wild and free.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
Waves of a serene life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather.
Henry David Thoreau
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
Henry David Thoreau
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
Henry David Thoreau
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
Henry David Thoreau
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
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
I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
Henry David Thoreau
Perfect sincerity and transparency make a great part of beauty, as in dewdrops, lakes, and diamonds.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
Henry David Thoreau
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.
Henry David Thoreau
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
Henry David Thoreau
Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.
Henry David Thoreau
When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.
Henry David Thoreau
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Henry David Thoreau
I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.
Henry David Thoreau
All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.
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
All things in this world must be seen with youthful, hopeful eyes.
Henry David Thoreau
A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.
Henry David Thoreau
You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.
Henry David Thoreau
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
The soul grows by subtraction, not addition.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Henry David Thoreau
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
Henry David Thoreau
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Henry David Thoreau
Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.
Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
Henry David Thoreau
The devil finds work for idle hands.
Henry David Thoreau
Life by conscious endeavor.
Henry David Thoreau
There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.
Henry David Thoreau
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Henry David Thoreau
Remember that the smallest seed of faith is of more worth than the largest fruit of happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Henry David Thoreau
Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?
Henry David Thoreau
The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.
Henry David Thoreau
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau
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 may you feel your pulse.
Henry David Thoreau
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Henry David Thoreau
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Henry David Thoreau
The true harvest of my life is intangible – a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.
Henry David Thoreau
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
Henry David Thoreau
Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?
Henry David Thoreau
Friends…they cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams.
Henry David Thoreau
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty. There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. And seen with the eye of the poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful.
Henry David Thoreau
One must maintain a little bittle of summer, even in the middle of winter.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
Time is like a handful of sand – the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers.
Henry David Thoreau
The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.
Henry David Thoreau
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority.
Henry David Thoreau
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.
Henry David Thoreau
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
Find your eternity in each moment.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.
Henry David Thoreau
A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Henry David Thoreau
Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
Henry David Thoreau
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
Henry David Thoreau
I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.
Henry David Thoreau
I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
Henry David Thoreau
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.
Henry David Thoreau
Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.
Henry David Thoreau
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Henry David Thoreau
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.
Henry David Thoreau
Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.
Henry David Thoreau
Maturity is when all of your mirrors turn into windows.
Henry David Thoreau
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
Henry David Thoreau
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
Henry David Thoreau
For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
Henry David Thoreau
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
Henry David Thoreau
The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.
Henry David Thoreau
The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.
Henry David Thoreau
The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but last fruits also.
Henry David Thoreau
Parting Words
Henry David Thoreau was a philosopher and writer who believed in the power of nature, simplicity, and self-reliance. He is best known for his book Walden, which chronicles two years he spent living in a cabin near Walden Pond. His quotes reflect his beliefs and paint a picture of the life philosophy he lived by.
What’s your favorite quote from Henry David Thoreau? Leave a comment below – we’d love to hear what you think!
P.S. You might also like these related quote collections:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
- Walter Benjamin Quotes
- Charles Baudelaire Quotes
- Virginia Woolf Quotes
- Transcendentalism Quotes
Originally Published: November 16, 2022
✍️ Cusco, Peru
