Sourced and curated.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Walden · 1854

★ 7.8

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.

Walden · 1854

★ 7.1

I 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.

Walden · 1854

★ 7.1

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.

Walden · 1854

★ 7.1

In the long run men hit only what they aim at.

Walden · 1854

★ 5.6

Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 5.5

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end... We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

If a man walk 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 whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Walden · 1854

★ 5.5

Essay · Magazine

Life Without Principle · 1862

★ 5.3

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

Walden · 1854

★ 4.8

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

Walden · 1854

★ 4.0

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

Walden · 1854

★ 4.0

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

We can never have enough of nature…. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property...the landscape is deformed.

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

1839

★ 3.8

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 3.8

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Walden · 1854

★ 3.8

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship; three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up.

Walden · 1854

★ 3.8

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

1859

★ 3.8

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

1850

★ 3.7

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

1853

★ 3.7

The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison.

The fate of the country...does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

1841

★ 3.6

Speech

Slavery in Massachusetts · 1854

★ 3.6

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

Walden · 1854

★ 2.3

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

Walden · 1854

★ 2.2

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

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."

Walden · 1854

★ 2.2

Essay · Political literature

Under 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.

The Relation of the Individual to the State · 1848

★ 2.1

Essay · Political literature

The Relation of the Individual to the State · 1848

★ 2.1

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Walden · 1854

★ 2.1

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live accordingly to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

Walden · 1854

★ 2.1

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

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.

1856

★ 2.1

Travel writing

1849

★ 2.0

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 2.0

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

1839

★ 1.9

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 1.9

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

All 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.

Walden · 1854

★ 1.4

Essay · Political literature