Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

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.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

When a dog runs at you whistle for him.

The frontiers are not east or west north or south but wherever a man fronts a fact.

Whateer we leave to God God does and blesses us.

Simplicity simplicity simplicity. I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.

When I hear music I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter.

I think that there is nothing not even crime more opposed to poetry to philosophy ay to life itself than this incessant business.

Things do not change we change.

Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is in fact a subtle detraction.

However mean your life is meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.

Where there is a brave man in the thickest of the fight there is the post of honor.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

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.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong as when you find a trout in the milk.

Experience is in the fingers and the head. The heart is inexperienced.