Walden By Thoreau Quotes

#1. For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; ... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.

Henry David Thoreau

#2. A mirror can contain the reflection of the whole universe, a whole skyful of stars in a piece of silvered glass no thicker than a breath.

Terry Pratchett

#3. Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.

Henry David Thoreau

#4. To be awake is to be alive.

Henry David Thoreau

#5. Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

Henry David Thoreau

#6. I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. I once found a kernel of corn in the middle of a deep wood by Walden, tucked in behind a lichen on a pine, about as high as my head, either by a crow or a squirrel. It was a mile at least from any corn-field.

Henry David Thoreau

#8. Industry jargon may not be a language your customer understands.

Ron Kaufman

#9. Society is commonly too cheap.

Henry David Thoreau

#10. My purpose in going to Walden Pond
was not to live cheaply
nor to live dearly there
but to transact some private business,
with the fewest obstacles ...
It's a good place for business ...
it offers advantages
which it may not be good policy to divulge.

Henry David Thoreau

#11. The fault-finder will find fault even in paradise.

Henry David Thoreau

#12. What he offered me is not for me to keep, but for me to give to another.

Garth Stein

#13. My parents were New Yorkers, and I was conceived in Los Angeles. My father was a makeup artist to Clint Eastwood and Richard Chamberlain.

Michele Lee

#14. Mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived

Henry David Thoreau

#15. I never lost an argument and my parents assumed I would be a lawyer. They cast me in that role.

Jared Harris

#16. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake,I pray?

Henry David Thoreau

#17. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

Henry David Thoreau

#18. I do not represent the Republican Party.

Arlen Specter

#19. The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.

Daniel J. Rice

#20. Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

Henry David Thoreau

#21. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.

Henry David Thoreau

#22. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.

Henry David Thoreau

#23. Let us rise early and fast, or breakfast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry-determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream?

Henry David Thoreau

#24. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

Henry David Thoreau

#25. Boeing is working on an invisible fighter jet so nobody can see who's flying it. Didn't George Bush fly this in the National Guard, I believe?

Craig Kilborn

#26. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe.

Henry David Thoreau

#27. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

Henry David Thoreau

#28. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

Henry David Thoreau

#29. The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau's Walden.

Edward Carpenter

#30. Rather than go to the gym, I would prefer to do martial arts because the time goes by quicker.

Milla Jovovich

#31. Zarathustra received his revelations from the archangels at age thirty, when he began his prophetic mission; Siddhartha's great renunciation of his princely life took place in his thirtieth year. Thoreau at age thirty finished his self-imposed isolation at Walden Pond.

Kevin Dann