3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much time is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many circumstances that I may say I am unborn.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.

In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain - I find no sea room - but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore.

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

I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the leastact of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.

We must heap up a great pile of doing, for a small diameter of being.

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.

Music never stops; it is only the listening that is intermittent.