Henry David Thoreau Quotes

This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.

I get a lot done considering I spend half my day sleeping.

The more business one has, the more you are able to accomplish, for you learn to economize your time.

The busier we are the more leisure we have.

You gotta know when to be lazy. Done correctly, it's an art form that benefits everyone.

I have a very full and busy life and occasionally I am asked, Scotty, how can you do all that you do? The most telling reply I can give is: Because I spend at least two hours a day doing nothing.

Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

Being successful doesn't make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful!

Locke, whom there is no reason to suspect of being a favorer of idleness or libertinism, has advanced that whoever hopes to employ any part of his time with efficacy and vigor must allow some of it to pass with trifles.

The essential question is not, "How busy are you?" but "What are you busy at?"

Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth.It is this: the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status and happiness in life.

To be at ease is better than to be at business.

Work hard, play hard.

Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.

And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.

The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.

In the ordinary business of life, industry can do anything which genius can do, and very many things which it cannot.

The man who works 52 weeks in the year does not do his best in any one week of the year, Daniel Guggenheim, onetime head of the greatest smelting and mining family in America, impressed upon me. Real recreation quickens aspiration. The true purpose of recreation is not merely to amuse, not merely to afford pleasure, not merely to kill time, but to increase our fitness, enhance our usefulness, spur achievement.

I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.

Nothing in business is so valuable as time.

I make no secret of the fact that I would rather lie on a sofa than sweep beneath it. But you have to be efficient if you're going to be lazy.

To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.

Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.

Perhaps the very best question that you can memorize and repeat, over and over, is, 'what is the most valuable use of my time right now?'