~ Henry David Thoreau Quotes ~

[MysteRy]

The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or temple on earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

[MysteRy]

Simplicity simplicity simplicity. I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.

[MysteRy]

However mean your life is meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in Paradise. Love your life.

[MysteRy]

When I would recreate myself I seek the darkest wood the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength the marrow of Nature.

[MysteRy]

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.

[MysteRy]

Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply; for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is in fact a subtle detraction.

[MysteRy]

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.