Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Self
Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts.—Journal, 10 July 1840
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude and goes his own way, there is a fork in the road, though the travelers along the highway see only a gap in the paling.—Journal, 18 October 1855
Silence is the communing of conscious soul with itself.—Journal, December 1838
There are infinite degrees of life, from that which is next to sleep and death, to that which is forever awake and immortal. We must not confound man and man. We cannot conceive of a greater difference than between the life of one man and that of another.—Journal, 13 January 1857
There is a stronger desire to be respectable to one's neighbors than to one's self.—Journal, 1845-1846
We are constantly invited to be what we are; as to something worthy and noble. I never waited but for myself to come round; none ever detained me, but I lagged or tagged after myself.—Journal, 2 February 1841
We can possibly get along with a neighbor, even with a bedfellow, whom we respect but very little; but as soon as it comes to this, that we do not respect ourselves, then we do not get along at all.—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 10 April 1853
We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.—Walden
We like to read a good description of no thing so well as that which we already know the best, as our friend, or ourselves even.—Journal, 13 October 1860
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.—Walden
