Top 500 Henry David Thoreau Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

— Henry David Thoreau

352. “Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn? – to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”

— Henry David Thoreau

353. “I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

354. “I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.”

— Henry David Thoreau

355. “I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.”

— Henry David Thoreau

356. “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.”

— Henry David Thoreau

357. “Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere.”

— Henry David Thoreau

358. “It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.”

— Henry David Thoreau

359. “We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.”

— Henry David Thoreau

360. “The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.”

— Henry David Thoreau

361. “I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”

— Henry David Thoreau

362. “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

363. “We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.”

— Henry David Thoreau

364. “Commerce is really as interesting as nature.”

— Henry David Thoreau

365. “I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.”

— Henry David Thoreau

366. “Let your walks now be a little more adventurous.”

— Henry David Thoreau

367. “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

368. “I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way .”

— Henry David Thoreau

369. “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.”

— Henry David Thoreau

370. “The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last.”

— Henry David Thoreau

371. “Trees indeed have hearts.”

— Henry David Thoreau

372. “Life in us is like the water in a river.”

— Henry David Thoreau

373. “You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”

— Henry David Thoreau

374. “The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.”

— Henry David Thoreau

375. “When I think of the gold-diggers and the Mormons, the slaves and the slave-holders and the flibustiers, I naturally dream of a glorious private life. No, I am not patriotic.”

— Henry David Thoreau

376. “Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody.”

— Henry David Thoreau

377. “Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.”

— Henry David Thoreau

378. “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.”

— Henry David Thoreau

379. “Being a teacher is like being in jail; once it’s on your record, you can never get rid of it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

380. “We loiter in winter while it is already spring.”

— Henry David Thoreau

381. “Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick.”

— Henry David Thoreau

382. “You never gain something but that you lose something.”

— Henry David Thoreau

383. “As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.”

— Henry David Thoreau

384. “In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts...”

— Henry David Thoreau

385. “A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors.”

— Henry David Thoreau

386. “What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?”

— Henry David Thoreau

387. “It is as hard to see one’s self as to look backwards without turning around.”

— Henry David Thoreau

388. “All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.”

— Henry David Thoreau

389. “The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.”

— Henry David Thoreau

390. “What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!”

— Henry David Thoreau

391. “As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.”

— Henry David Thoreau

392. “The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.”

— Henry David Thoreau

393. “Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”

— Henry David Thoreau

394. “Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man’s destiny were not equally so?”

— Henry David Thoreau

395. “Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another’s experience only by his own.”

— Henry David Thoreau

396. “A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.”

— Henry David Thoreau

397. “No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.”

— Henry David Thoreau

398. “By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.”

— Henry David Thoreau

399. “For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once done well is done forever.”

— Henry David Thoreau

400. “Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”

— Henry David Thoreau