Quotes about Reflection
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
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
— Henry David Thoreau
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
— Henry David Thoreau
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
It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.
— Henry David Thoreau
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
— Henry David Thoreau
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
— Henry David Thoreau
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.
— Henry David Thoreau
Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare
— Henry David Thoreau
In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.
— Henry David Thoreau
Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
— Henry David Thoreau
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
— Henry David Thoreau