Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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	The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
Advice	I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
Business	I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. - (naturalist)
Charity	If you give money, spend yourself with it.
Children	Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.
Clothing	We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Communication	I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.
Corruption	The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.
Do-gooders	If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
Education	What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
Emperors	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.
Evidence	Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Evil	There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Flying	Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
Government	How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
Government	If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
Intent	In the long run, men only hit what they aim at.
Killing	I do not wish to kill or to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which these things would be by me unavoidable.
Life	The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Life	Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives; I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
Life	No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.
Money	Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.
Money	To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
Mortality	Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Naturalism	If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
Nature	It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.
Nature	The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.
Obedience	Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Peace	I did not know that we had ever quarreled. - (when urged to make his peace with God)
Polished writing	Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
Politicians	I went to the store the other day to buy a bolt for our front door, for as I told the storekeeper, the Governor was coming here. Aye, said he, and the Legislature too. Then I will take two bolts, said I.
Progress	We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Quest	Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Reading	Many college textbooks, which were a weariness and stumbling block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.
Reflection	Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.
Religion	God does not sympathize with the popular movements.
Repentance	If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behavior.
Society	What men call the social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtues of pigs in a litter which lie close togheter to keep themselves warm.
Success	Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Taxation	If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.
Thoreaufare	As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Tools	Men have become the tools of their tools.
True wealth	A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.
Truth	Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.
War	What is human warfare but just this: an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
Wealth	The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.
Wealth	Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
wisdom	All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
wisdom	It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. - (Naturalist)
Work	Wood stumps warmed me twice -- once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire.
World	What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

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