Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Dreams

• 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

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Walden ch. 18 (1854)

• Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Love, Graduation, Dream

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.238, Courier Corporation

• Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Motivational, Dream

• If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined...

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  "Walden". Book by Henry David Thoreau, 1854.

• Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Love, Friendship, Best Friend

• 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

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  Walden ch. 18 (1854)

• 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; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Live Life, Ambition

  Henry David Thoreau (2006). “Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles”, p.31, Heron Dance Press

• You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. I wish to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, everyday phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Lying, Inspiration

• Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Love, Life, Dream

  Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S. Cramer (2007). “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”, p.170, Yale University Press

• A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Dream, Kind

  "Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles".

• 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. . . . In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Dream, Live Life

  Walden ch. 18 (1854)

• The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Dream, Apotheosis

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.192, Xist Publishing

• Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening, reminiscences of our sanest hours. The voice of nature is always encouraging.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, New Year, Nature

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.194, Courier Corporation

• I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Dream, Winter

  Henry David Thoreau (1974). “The correspondence of Henry David Thoreau”, Greenwood Pub Group

• Instead of water we got here a draught of beer, a lumberer's drink, which would acclimate and naturalize a man at once,-which would make him see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sough among the pines.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Beer, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Maine Woods (Annotated Edition)”, p.24, Jazzybee Verlag

• It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Appreciate, Giving

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.482, Simon and Schuster

• We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Time, Memories

  1841 Journal entry, 19 Feb.

• It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador a greater wildness than in some recess of Concord.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Nature, Inspire

  David R. Foster, Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Thoreau's Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape”, p.5, Harvard University Press

• I was born upon thy bank, river, My blood flows in thy stream, And thou meanderest forever, At the bottom of my dream.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Blood, Rivers

  Henry David Thoreau, John C. Broderick, Robert Sattelmeyer (1981). “Journal”, p.5, Princeton University Press

• In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, Running, Dream

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.167, Penguin

• I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Funny, Life, Dream

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.2848, Delphi Classics

• Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Sunset, Night

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.165, Simon and Schuster

• This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Dream, Believe

  Henry David Thoreau, Joseph O. Valentine, Thoreau Society (2001). “Thoreau on Land: Nature's Canvas”, p.120, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Men, Evil

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.56, Xist Publishing

• I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. Its broad base spreads over a village or two, which does not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. It ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dream, Horse, Knowledge

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