None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Old Age
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I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Business
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Things do not change; we change.
- Henry David Thoreau - In On Change
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Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Dreams
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Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Dreams
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If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Dreams
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What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Education
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The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Friendship
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The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Friendship
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It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Imagination
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Life
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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Life
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I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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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.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Nature
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What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
- Henry David Thoreau - In Society
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Men have become the tools of their tools.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Technology
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As if we could kill time without injuring eternity!
- Henry David Thoreau - In Time
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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Time
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What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
- Henry David Thoreau - In War
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All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
- Henry David Thoreau - In Words to the Wise
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