Enlightening Quotes by Henry Thoreau

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Live deliberately.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

The world is but a canvas to our imagination.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

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.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, but good for something.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it.

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.

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.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

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

Enlightening Quotes by Henry Thoreau part 2

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

That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

The only true law is that which leads to freedom.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

What is once well done is done forever.

Be not merely good, but be good for something.

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

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

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.

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.

I have learned 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.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

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

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.

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

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.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

I stand in awe of my body.

When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.