Henry David Thoreau Strength Quotations

There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and for mere gluttony.

I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony.

We say justly that the weak person is flat, for, like all flat substances, he does not stand in the direction of his strength, that is, on his edge, but affords a convenient surface to put upon. He slides all the way through life.... But the brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side and is equally strong every way.

For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself

It is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world, which the humblest man has not faculties to surmount.

When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.

The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son ofearth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshipers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.