Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

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

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.

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.

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

I sometimes fall into the trap of doing what I think I should be doing rather than what I want to be doing.

I hated my work. It never seemed to me to be what I should be doing.

What good is it to live a life that brings pains?

Why go through life feeling cheated? It does nothing but make you bitter.

I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

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

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

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

I hate the domestic life.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.

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

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.

I wish I had had a great disappointment, a real one.

What has changed is that nothing has changed... that's what has made me more unhappy than everything else.

I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.

I always hated being a child. I always felt like an adult trapped in a child's body.

People saying, 'Life didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.' Welcome to the club. I wanted to be the starting center-fielder for the Boston Red Sox, for chrissakes!