Henry David Thoreau Quotes

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.

I do not want to work to correspond to an image.

My art and my creativities were totally something that was of my own heart and mind. I could never let anybody dictate to me what I should write and how I would write it.

My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice.

Everybody has to have his own style, his own game. Everybody has to be himself. I'm listening to nobody. I have my own mind, my own heart.

People say that you're going the wrong way when it's simply a way of your own.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.

If you have anything really valuable to contribute to the world it will come through the expression of your own personality, that single spark of divinity that sets you off and makes you different from every other living creature.

Think your own thoughts.

People can dress you the way they want, they can do your makeup the way they want, but they can never take away your voice.

I'm just who I am. I don't try to change myself for other people.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child tendencies to deviation.

I think it's good to do your own thing and want to be different, and not look like everyone else.

Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way.

It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.

I'd hate it if everyone in the world liked me, my music and what I wore. It'd make it boring, and I wouldn't have anything to work towards. It's not to everyone's taste, but I can only be me.

When you don't dress like everybody else, you don't have to think like everybody else.

I pay for what I call eccentricity and my will to evolve.

I've learned to think, I may succeed or fail, but I'm going to do so on the merit of my own instincts.

I'm constantly trying to be as original as I can.