Henry David Thoreau Quotes

We are all fighters, every single person who walks this earth is a fighter, everything that lives. To live is to fight. And we just fight in different arenas.

Life is wasted on the living.

My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Still we live meanly like ants, though the fable tells us we were long ago changed into men.

We learn to fight and to grow strong by fighting.

A busy life is a wasted life.

If you fight with all your might, there is a chance of life; where as death is certain if you cling to your corner

I see a man's life is a tedious one.

We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

Before I die, I want to fight for life.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

There are sordid souls that eat and drink and breed and die, and imagine they have lived.

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.

Our whole life is like a play.

Every time you meet a situation you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.

If you want to live your whole life free from pain,you must either be a god or a corpse.

Your troubles may point you to death and destruction, but God's Word points you to life.

It is a conquest when we can lift ourselves above the annoyances of circumstances over which we have no control; but it is a greater victory when we can make those circumstances our helpers,--when we can appreciate the good there is in them. It has often seemed to me as if Life stood beside me, looking me in the face, and saying, "Child, you must learn to like me in the form in which you see me, before I can offer myself to you in any other aspect.

[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.

I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads.

We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.

I try not to take for granted how lucky we are to have life and breath and opportunity. Once we've got that, we can conquer anything.

She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.