Henry David Thoreau, born on July 12, 1817. He was an American environmentalist, author, poet, and philosopher. He wrote Civil Disobedience in 1849. Civil Disobedience is not about lawlessness or disobeying authorities for its own sake. It is about a love of government and making it the best that it can be. Although Thoreau’s work, in general, was underrated at the time, his work, became massively influential in the next century. It is useless to whine and complain about the government because that government is you. You have chosen it. It is a government for the people and by the people. Henry David Thoreau quotes will help us understand his thoughts on the government, and how change is important in moving forward positively.
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
- “It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.” Henry David Thoreau
- “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” Henry David Thoreau
- “Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” Henry David Thoreau
- “He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.” Henry David Thoreau
- “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” Henry David Thoreau
- “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” Henry David Thoreau
- “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” 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
- “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 which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.” 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
- “Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” Henry David Thoreau
- “Where the most beautiful wildflowers grow, there mans spirit is fed and poets grow.” 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
- “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city, you go into the desperate country and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” Henry David Thoreau
- “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” 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
- “Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.” Henry David Thoreau
- “We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” 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
- “We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.” Henry David Thoreau
- “None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.” Henry David Thoreau
- “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Henry David Thoreau
- “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.” Henry David Thoreau
- “Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.” Henry David Thoreau
- “That government is best which governs least.” Henry David Thoreau
- “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
- “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
- “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.” 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, Walden
- “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” Henry David Thoreau
- “I have learned this at least by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dream, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagines, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Henry David Thoreau
- “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Henry David Thoreau
- “What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?” Henry David Thoreau
- “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
- “Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Henry David Thoreau
