Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation..

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

I don't want to dream anymore, I want my life to be real!

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.

My dreams have become puny with the reality my life has become.

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.

After you get what you want you don't want it.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.

She's not happy about the life she is living but to jump through the hoop would mean to succumb to death.

My job is discouraging in the extreme—it often tempts me to quit the helm in despair.

Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual

I guess I'm just a frustrated cowboy.

Despair - or as I like to call it, des-pair - means feeling unpaired in a world in which it feels like everyone else is paired with a good job, a happy marriage, loving family, caring, and hope - and you're not.

There are so many people who try so hard and have such big dreams, and it doesn't happen for them.

The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

I remember feeling that. I couldn't do, nor did I want to do, the kinds of roles I'd been doing.

The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.

What a miserable thing life is: you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough.

Expectation is the mother of all frustration.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.