Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Self
A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pigmies, and not be the biggest pigmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.—Walden
Ah, that l have known! How hard it is to remember what is most memorable! We remember how we itched, not how our hearts beat.—Journal, 11 June 1851
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.—Thoreau to Benjamin B. Wiley, 26 April 1857
But some express themselves chiefly by their gait and carriage, with swelling breasts or elephantine roll and elevated brows, making themselves moving and adequate signs of themselves, having no other outlet.—Journal, 21 August 1852
Do not speak for other men; speak for yourself.—Journal, 25 December 1851
Do what nobody can do for you. Omit to do everything else.—Journal, 1850
Do what you reprove yourself for not doing. Know that you are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with yourself without reason.—Journal, 1850
Emerson says that his life is so unprofitable and shabby for the most part, that he is driven to all sorts of resources, and, among the rest, to men. I tell him that we differ only in our resources. Mine is to get away from men.—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 8 August 1854
For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.—"Walking"
Go not so far out of your way for a truer life—keep strictly onward in that path alone which your genius points out. Do the things which lie nearest to you but which are difficult to do.—Journal, 12 January 1852
