ELOQUENTLY PUT, HENRY DAVID THOREAU

INSIGHTS FROM THOREAU

"... 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. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary... and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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."
-Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Conclusion, Paragraph 5


"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."

-William Habbington, To My Honoured Friend Sir Ed. P. Knight, as written in Walden

"No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe."
-Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Conclusion, Paragraph 12

"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring."
-Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Conclusion, Paragraph 13

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
-Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Conclusion, Paragraph 15