Quotes from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? 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.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I love a broad margin to my life.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“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. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Flint's pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; — so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed — him all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way...But lo! men have become the tools of their tools...We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Старость годится в наставники не больше, если не меньше, чем юность, — она не столькому научилась, сколько утратила.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Нам внушают преувеличенное понятие о важности нашей работы, а между тем, как много мы оставляем несделанным!”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Живя в роскоши, ничего не создашь, кроме предметов роскоши, будь то в сельском хозяйстве, торговле, литературе или искусстве.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Я советую вам остерегаться всех дел, требующих нового платья, а не нового человека. Если сам человек не обновился, как может новое платье прийтись ему впору?”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Каждое поколение смеется над модами предыдущего, но благоговейно следует новым”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

About the author

Popular quotes

“He turned, stood above the crowd gazing up at him. There was silence in the
square. And yet he had never felt such complete communication. It was as though they read each other’s thoughts, as though they were one and the same: they were part of him,every Florentine standing below, eyes turned up to him, and he was a part of them.”
― Irving Stone, quote from The Agony and the Ecstasy

“His eyes searched mine. "Thank you."

"For What?" I loved the feel of his arms around me and how I fit against him, hard against soft. He trailed his fingers over my arm, and I was amazed by how he could make me shiver.

"For everything," he said.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, quote from Opal

“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, quote from Nausea

“In one thing you have not changed, dear friend," said Aragorn: "you still speak in riddles."
"What? In riddles?" said Gandalf. "No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, quote from The Two Towers

“Evil is real - and powerful. It has to be fought, not explained away, not fled. And God is against evil all the way. So each of us has to decide where WE stand, how we're going to live OUR lives. We can try to persuade ourselves that evil doesn't exist; live for ourselves and wink at evil. We can say that it isn't so bad after all, maybe even try to call it fun by clothing it in silks and velvets. We can compromise with it, keep quiet about it and say it's none of our business. Or we can work on God's side, listen for His orders on strategy against the evil, no matter how horrible it is, and know that He can transform it.”
― Catherine Marshall, quote from Christy

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.