Henry David Thoreau Quotes

You just gotta live your life and do it your way.

I don't mean to say that I'm about to state my credo here on this page, but merely to affirm, sincerely for the first time in my life, my belief in man as an individual and independent entity. Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able - or even have the courage - to achieve.

As is well know, I, ah..regard myself as a religious man, yet I belong to no church. I'm an able soldier yet I abhor armies. I can even add that I've been introduced to hundreds of women but never married. in other words no one's ever talked me into anything.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?

There's people trying to tell me what to do, but I'm not like some marketing scam.

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.

I am definitely an individual.

I appreciate individualism.

I am a rank individualist.

I think people should do whatever they want to do. That's the point. Why should you care what other people think or say? You're not living in their pocket.

Man exists for his own sake, and not to add a laborer to the State.

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right, to choose his own surroundings.

Like Frank Sinatra, I'm doing it my way.

I think everyone should be their own individualized person.

I don't play no one else's game and I don't run no one else's race because if I did that, I wouldn't be who I am.

I'm always just gonna do whatever I want. I don't feel any pressure to appeal to anyone in particular.

This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

I think it's very desirable to be an individual and a free thinker.

Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter theunion, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke.

I will not live out of me I will not see with others' eyes My good is good, my evil ill I would be free.

I've always been like nah, I'm going to have it my way, that way, when I look out that window at the end of the day, I can say I did it my way, whether it's on a higher level, or a level where I can just maintain, I can still say I did it my way.

I do not want any patronage, as I do not give any. I am a lover of my own liberty, and so I would do nothing to restrict yours. I simply want to please my own conscience which is God.

I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, and which does not cower to human opinion: Which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or of the few, and guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

I should like to be remembered as the man who raised a voice against... placing limitations on the freedom of the individual.