“Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?”
– Henry David Thoreau
“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.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“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
“The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“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.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“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.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“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
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Men have become the tools of their tools.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“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
“I 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.”
– Henry David Thoreau