Henry David Thoreau Quotes

It's hard to make something feel like it needs to exist.

What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Nothing is important.

We are not significant on the cosmic scale.

But whether or not you are here, you are here—because these words are for you, and they wouldn't exist if you weren't here in some way.

I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

There is nothing insignificant-nothing.

I'm just trying to matter.

If you're right, and nobody really cares what's out there, I wonder whether we're even worth saving.

To be here is immense.

If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die every day and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activities, you'd probably never get out of bed.

Without literature, life is hell.

When people are talking about you, it means that you exist.

None of it meant anything, and all of it was important.

I hadn’t been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn’t really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.

People are irrelevant. They're as irrelevant as many other prominent leftists are.

You take a book, and what can you do with a book? Can you cook an egg on a book? No. Can you dig a hole? No. Is it a good weapon? No. The fact that it's good for nothing kind of makes it almost all-important.

Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.

The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.

Ultimately everyone, no matter who you are, we all at our core want to just know that we matter.

But it's morning. Within my hands is another day. Another day to listen and love and walk and glory. I am here for another day.