Henry David Thoreau quotes

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

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

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.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

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

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

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.

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.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.

Love your life, poor as it is.

Things do not change; we change.

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

That government is best which governs not at all

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