Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Night is the mother of thoughts.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts.

Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

I am a late starter. I like to go on into the night when it's quiet and everything has shut down. I find that's where music and minds open in the dark.

I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.

I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.

I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.

Puttering is really a time to be alone, to dream, to get in touch with yourself...To putter is to discover.

I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night.

The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.

Solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society can ill do without.

Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude.

A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?

Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

One is inspired only in solitude.

After I've done the salesman bit, I like to be quiet and retreat, because that's whereI write from. I'm a sort of quiet little person.

The difference between me and many young people is, I don't carry music with me. I like to think. I don't use any modern convenience to be talking to other people, because I like my time to think. I go to the garden in the morning, and this time, I'm thinking ideas, I'm not drawing, I'm thinking.

A man forced to spend his life without ever having the right, without ever finding the time, to shut himself up all alone, no matter where, to think, to reflect, to work, to dream? Ah! my dear boy, a key, the key of a door which one can lock this is happiness, mark you, the only happiness!

I took the pieces you threw away, put them together by night and day. Washed by the rain. Dried by the sun. A million pieces all in one.

The night is my companion, and solitude my guide.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.