Henry David Thoreau Quotes

If you live the way others want you to, you are called a nice guy. If you live the way you want, you are called selfish.

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

What makes men happy is liking what they have to do. This is a principle on which society is not founded

I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.

I can't spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet.

If you let society and your peers define who you are, you're the less for it.

I didn't want people to decide what I was going to wear and what I was going to look like and how I should behave.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.

Each man must have his "I"; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

If my life choices had to be predicated based on what was expected of me from a community on either side, that's going to make me feel really straitjacketed, and I don't want to feel that.

Everyone in the world, regardless if they're Muslim or not, does not have to adhere to the label society slaps on you.

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts.

You can't live your life to suit other people. The harder you try, the more restrictions they'll put on you just for the fun of seeing you jump through their hoops.

Man is busy desiring to find something which only he can do so that his ego acquires importance.

Nothing will kill what you've been called to do more than comparing yourself to someone else.

Everybody sacrifices something in an attempt to reach what they think society wants.

But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.

We have to steer our true life’s course. Whatever your calling is in life! The whole purpose of being here is to figure out what that is as soon as possible, so you go about the business of being on track, of not being owned by what your mother said, what society said, whatever people think a woman is supposed to be when you can exceed other people’s expectations and be defined by your own!

The image of all the cars leaving pastel-colored people at the same time has never really left me as an anti-ambition for life!

It took the producers a while to realize I wanted a full-bodied life. I wanted to get out before I felt I'd sacrificed so much to get somewhere that I couldn't afford to leave.