Henry David Thoreau Quotes
The question is not what you look at, but what you see



I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.



When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.



A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colours, or the heavens without their azure.



The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.



A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.



If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.



Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.



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



Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.



Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties



All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.



Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.



To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.



Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.








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