Top 500 Henry David Thoreau Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “To regret deeply is to live afresh.”

— Henry David Thoreau

352. “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

353. “Perfect sincerity and transparency make a great part of beauty, as in dewdrops, lakes, and diamonds.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

355. “Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.”

— Henry David Thoreau

356. “Birds never sing in caves.”

— Henry David Thoreau

357. “We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bone.”

— Henry David Thoreau

358. “Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.”

— Henry David Thoreau

359. “Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring.”

— Henry David Thoreau

360. “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

363. “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 – to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul?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

364. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

366. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

374. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

376. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

377. “The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July.”

— Henry David Thoreau

378. “The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.”

— Henry David Thoreau

379. “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

380. “Trees indeed have hearts.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

382. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

384. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

389. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

396. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

Featured in: Real Quotes

398. “What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau