Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Life

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

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.
[Also known as:]Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.

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.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

What is called genius is the abundance of life or health.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.[Also known as:]The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.