Walden is a book written by Henry David Thoreau that was published in 1854.
It is regarded an important contribution to New England Transcendentalism since it is a reflection on the author’s experience of simple life in natural surroundings.
Here are some of the best quotes from Walden book for you.
Table of Contents
Walden Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
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Quotes from Walden
“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Confucius said, “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden)., or Life in the Woods
“The church is a sort of hospital for men’s souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
Best Walden Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Our life is frittered away by detail…Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand…Simplify, simplify!” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
Famous Walden Quotes
“Things do not change; we change.” ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“…for my greatest skill has been to want but little.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“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, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
Powerful Walden Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
“What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“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).
“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
Profound Walden Quotes
“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town… he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
“I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
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