“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”
“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
“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”
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth”
“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new”
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see”
“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest”
“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes”
“I have a room all to myself; it is nature”
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this”
“Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.”
“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 he hears, however measured or far away”
“Wildness is the preservation of the world”
Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862, best-known for Walden, pub. 9th August 1854