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Copyright © 2008 The Walden Woods Project. For personal, educational or noncommercial use only.

Thoreau's Life & Writings

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Henry D. Thoreau Mis-Quotation Page
 

This page is devoted to those quotations either misquoted or erroneously attributed to Henry D. Thoreau

—for more information, click on a quotation below—

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• Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
   

• Friends are kind to each other's hopes, they cherish each other's dreams.
   

• Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
   

• If you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.
   

• In wilderness is the preservation of the world.
   

• It is not enough to be busy. The question is: what are we busy about?
   

• It seems when my legs begin walking, my mind begins working . . . any writing I do sitting down is wooden.
   

• Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
   

• Many men fish all their lives without ever realizing that it is not the fish they are after.
   

• Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
   

• There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it, and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
   

• Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
   

• What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
   

• You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

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