Thoreau's Walden Quotes

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

-I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

-Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

-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.

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

-As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

-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.

-All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

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

-Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

-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.

-The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

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

-I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

-Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.