Top 500 Henry David Thoreau Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Our molting season, like that of the fouls, must be a crisis in our lives.”

— Henry David Thoreau

402. “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

— Henry David Thoreau

403. “The little things in life are as interesting as the big ones.”

— Henry David Thoreau

404. “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.”

— Henry David Thoreau

405. “People die of fright and live of confidence.”

— Henry David Thoreau

406. “What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.”

— Henry David Thoreau

407. “To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

408. “Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”

— Henry David Thoreau

409. “Talk of mysteries! – Think of our life in nature, – daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”

— Henry David Thoreau

410. “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

— Henry David Thoreau

411. “Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much.”

— Henry David Thoreau

412. “The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.”

— Henry David Thoreau

413. “The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements.”

— Henry David Thoreau

414. “The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”

— Henry David Thoreau

415. “The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.”

— Henry David Thoreau

416. “There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”

— Henry David Thoreau

417. “Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.”

— Henry David Thoreau

418. “Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.”

— Henry David Thoreau

419. “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

420. “Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.”

— Henry David Thoreau

421. “The three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

423. “Every sunset I witness inspires me with the desire to go to West as distant and as fair as that which the sun goes down. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.”

— Henry David Thoreau

424. “There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.”

— Henry David Thoreau

425. “Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. “Tell the tailors,” said he, “to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.” His companion’s prayer is forgotten.”

— Henry David Thoreau

426. “He who eats the fruit should at least plant the seed; ay, if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed.”

— Henry David Thoreau

427. “A man may esteem himself happy when that which is his food is also his medicine.”

— Henry David Thoreau

428. “Oh, one world at a time!”

— Henry David Thoreau

429. “Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.”

— Henry David Thoreau

430. “If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.”

— Henry David Thoreau

431. “God is alone,-but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion.”

— Henry David Thoreau

432. “Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings.”

— Henry David Thoreau

433. “Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.”

— Henry David Thoreau

434. “Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.”

— Henry David Thoreau

435. “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

— Henry David Thoreau

436. “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.”

— Henry David Thoreau

437. “Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction – a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.”

— Henry David Thoreau

438. “In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.”

— Henry David Thoreau

439. “A man sits as many risks as he runs.”

— Henry David Thoreau

440. “The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!”

— Henry David Thoreau

441. “The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.”

— Henry David Thoreau

442. “I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

— Henry David Thoreau

443. “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”

— Henry David Thoreau

444. “Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man?”

— Henry David Thoreau

445. “It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver.”

— Henry David Thoreau

446. “I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.”

— Henry David Thoreau

447. “I am a majority of one.”

— Henry David Thoreau

448. “The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.”

— Henry David Thoreau

449. “I have a room all to myself; it is nature.”

— Henry David Thoreau

450. “Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.”

— Henry David Thoreau