Verified Quotes
Every quote on this page is verified against the named source work.
Henry David Thoreau, American essayist and philosopher who moved to a cabin at Walden Pond to strip life down to its essentials, gets quoted everywhere and sourced almost nowhere. The 13 quotes below are different: each one is checked word for word against the cited work, starting with Walden, not copied from aggregator sites that pass misattributions along. The source is named under every line, so you can trace each quote back to the page it came from.
Read Henry David Thoreau's full profile and how they reason →10 verified quotes
On leaving a comfortable routine to actually live intentionally:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On staying in a job that quietly drains you:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On taking a path nobody around you understands:
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On cutting commitments down to what actually matters:
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On betting on a dream nobody else believes in:
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On expecting a new city or job to fix what's actually inside you:
Things do not change; we change.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On accepting an unglamorous chapter of your life instead of resenting it:
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On choosing an honest answer over a comfortable lie:
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On weighing a lower paying job that actually feeds you:
Yet money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
On staying open after your plans have fallen apart:
The universe is wider than our views of it.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
1 verified quote
On deciding whether to go along with a policy you think is wrong:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
2 verified quotes
On finding meaning in an ordinary life you feel you should have outgrown:
It is not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.Henry David Thoreau, Journal
On whether to protect yourself after being hurt in love:
There is no remedy for love but to love more.Henry David Thoreau, Journal