3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

What's the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour's walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.

There is light on the earth and leaves, as if they were burnished. It is the glistening autumnal side of summer. I feel a cool vein in the breeze, which braces my thought, and I pass with pleasure over sheltered and sunny portions of the sand where the summer's heat is undiminished, and I realize what a friend I am losing.

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs.

A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.

Our life is frittered away by detail simplify, simplify.

Men die of fright and live of confidence.

When the spring stirs my blood / With the instinct to travel, / I can't get enough gravel / On the old Marlborough Road.

I hate museums; there is nothing so weighs upon my spirits. They are the catacombs of nature. One green bud of spring, one willow catkin, one faint trill from a migrating sparrow would set the world on its legs again. The life that is in a single green weed is of more worth than all this death.

Be yourself not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.