Henry David Thoreau

'Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.'



'Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.'

'How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?'

'I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.' have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.'

 

'I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.'

'If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?'

 

'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.'

'If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.'

'In wilderness is the preservation of the world.'

'Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.'

'It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.'

'Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.'

'Men are born to succeed, not to fail.'

 

'Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.'

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

 

'The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?'

'There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.'

'There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.'

'To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.'

'Truths and roses have thorns about them.'

 

 

'We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.'

'While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.'

'You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.'