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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Autobiography and memoir22 quotes
Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854If 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. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that 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 · 1854I 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. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854In the long run men hit only what they aim at. — Henry David Thoreau · 1854All 22 quotes →Political literature3 quotes
I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least";... Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all." — Henry David Thoreau · 1848Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... The only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. — Henry David Thoreau · 1848All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. — Henry David Thoreau · 1848Travel writing1 quote
A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. — Henry David Thoreau · 1849