Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instants truce between virtue and vice.

There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of expediency. There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.

Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony.

The silence rings—it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible—I hear the unspeakable.

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.

Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.

Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all mens sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice.

The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

I heartily accept the motto, That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.

The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.