The Wisdom of Henry David Thoreau

The Wisdom of Henry David Thoreau....

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.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

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

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

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.

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

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

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

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

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

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

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

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 yourself.

Things do not change; we change.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.