Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Truths ... are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

Don't be just another guy going down the street and going nowhere.

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

Sometimes I wish they'd ask for my wisdom more often - there are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don't want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable - so painless. It's what they've chosen.

But it seems that the wind is setting East, and the withering of all Woods may be drawing near.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

Tradition is laziness.

May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.

Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.

If you don't keep pushing the limits, you wake up one day and you're the "center square to block."

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

Habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment.

Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.

BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.

It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descendedmore deeply into chaos.

We always know which is the best road to follow, but we follow only the road that we have become accustomed to.

How will the world change if we do not question it?

The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.

A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.

Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.

When you make something that everyone likes, it's very easy to say, "Well, I'll just repeat that." Because that was easy. I have a formula. But creatively, it's not very interesting.

We encourage one another in mediocrity.