Henry David Thoreau quotes

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Our life is frittered away by detail.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

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.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Things do not change; we change.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.