Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

I saw a delicate flower had grown up two feet high between the horses' feet and the wheel trach. An inch more to the right or left had sealed its fate, or an inch higher. Yet it lived and flourished, and never knew the danger it incurred. It did not borrow trouble, nor invite an evil fate by apprehending it.

Henry David Thoreau

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. . . . Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

Henry David Thoreau

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

Henry David Thoreau

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.

Henry David Thoreau

The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.

Henry David Thoreau

Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?

Henry David Thoreau

Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.

Henry David Thoreau

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Henry David Thoreau

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Henry David Thoreau

The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.

Henry David Thoreau

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

Henry David Thoreau

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.

Henry David Thoreau

Still we live meanly like ants, though the fable tells us we were long ago changed into men.

Henry David Thoreau

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreau

I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again."

Henry David Thoreau

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry,-determine to make a day of it.

Henry David Thoreau

If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him . . he will be surrounded by grandeur.

Henry David Thoreau

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

Henry David Thoreau

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Henry David Thoreau

My life is like a stroll upon the beach.

Henry David Thoreau

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

Henry David Thoreau

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Gyorgy Ligeti

I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.

H. L. Mencken

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

H. L. Mencken

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

H. L. Mencken

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

H. L. Mencken

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Become someone's hero.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Never resist a generous impulse.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Fight fairly. Give generously. Laugh loudly. Love deeply.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Happiness is not based on possessions, power or prestige, but on relationships with people you love and respect.