# Henry David Thoreau's best quotes (with sources)

Thoreau's sharpest lines from Walden, Civil Disobedience, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and his journals and letters, each with its source. Only quotes Wikiquote can trace to his writings.

- 43 votes · 14 items
- Feb 13, 2020 · Thabo Nkosi
- https://even.best/en/l/2107/henry-david-thoreau-s-best-quotes-with-sources

## Top 14

1. **Simplify, simplify.** (5 · ▲5 ▼0) — Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.
2. **Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — Walden, Conclusion.
3. **The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.** (3 · ▲4 ▼1) — Walden (1854), Economy.
4. **If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Walden, Economy.
5. **I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Civil Disobedience.
6. **It takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).
7. **Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.** (2 · ▲3 ▼1) — Civil Disobedience (1849).
8. **My life has been the poem I would have writ, but I could not both live and utter it.** (2 · ▲3 ▼1) — A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
9. **Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Walden, last lines.
10. **It is a great art to saunter.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Journal.
11. **How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Journal, 1851.
12. **Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Journal, 1854.
13. **It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Letter to Harrison Blake, 1857.
14. **That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — Journal, 1856.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.