Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
Henry David Thoreau
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Honesty
Ought
Truth
Better
Believe
Make
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more harmonious compositions.
Henry David Thoreau
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
Henry David Thoreau
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
Henry David Thoreau
Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
Henry David Thoreau
You may raise enough money to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business.
Henry David Thoreau
Even the best things are not equal to their fame.
Henry David Thoreau
At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.
Henry David Thoreau
I have a great deal of company in my house especially in the morning, when nobody calls.
Henry David Thoreau
We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which came and went on the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
Who hears the fishes when they cry?
Henry David Thoreau
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere for that will leaven the whole lump.
Henry David Thoreau
Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.
Henry David Thoreau
The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?
Henry David Thoreau
Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,--if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour.
Henry David Thoreau
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
Henry David Thoreau
I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.
Henry David Thoreau
Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.
Henry David Thoreau
