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What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well? -- Henry David Thoreau
You have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these American days ... Farmers' sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light. -- Henry David Thoreau
We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. -- Henry David Thoreau
You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be. -- Henry David Thoreau
The perception of beauty is a moral test. -- Henry David Thoreau
Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie; and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it. -- Henry David Thoreau
We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending. -- Henry David Thoreau
As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die. -- Henry David Thoreau
The Anglo-American can indeed cut down and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological -- Henry David Thoreau
The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth. -- Henry David Thoreau
Life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting ... We have not got half-way to dawn yet. -- Henry David Thoreau
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows. -- Henry David Thoreau
Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could
a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's
eyes for an instant? -- Henry David Thoreau
Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up. -- Henry David Thoreau
A hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's. -- Henry David Thoreau
Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives, all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here. -- Henry David Thoreau
The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids. -- Henry David Thoreau
I have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at length gave them no peace. They did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk. -- Henry David Thoreau
You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can. -- Henry David Thoreau
How many fine thoughts has every man had! How few fine thoughts are expressed! -- Henry David Thoreau
The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. -- Henry David Thoreau
A kitten is so flexible that she is almost double; the hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the forepart plays. She does not discover that her tail belongs to her until you tread on it. -- Henry David Thoreau
To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done,and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. -- Henry David Thoreau
It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps. -- Henry David Thoreau
In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,
if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,
and they are themselves so much the better morally for it. -- Henry David Thoreau
Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end. -- Henry David Thoreau
The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings. -- Henry David Thoreau
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. -- Henry David Thoreau
Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light. -- Henry David Thoreau
The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest. -- Henry David Thoreau
Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns. -- Henry David Thoreau
The Slothful do not have the time to become virtuous or despicable. -- Henry David Thoreau
Of what use the friendliest disposition even, if there are no hours given to Friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties and relations? Friendship first, Friendship last. -- Henry David Thoreau
Keep pace with the drummer you hear, however measured or far away. -- Henry David Thoreau
The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders. -- Henry David Thoreau
We have used up all our inherited freedom, like the young bird the albumen in the egg. It is not an era of repose. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them. -- Henry David Thoreau
To a small man every greater is an exaggeration. -- Henry David Thoreau
No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? -- Henry David Thoreau
If I should sell my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. -- Henry David Thoreau
We fritter away our energy and creativity ...
we get bogged down in the thick of thin things. -- Henry David Thoreau
Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit. -- Henry David Thoreau
Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful. -- Henry David Thoreau
At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death. -- Henry David Thoreau
Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail ... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act. -- Henry David Thoreau
You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you. -- Henry David Thoreau
True kindness is a pure divine affinity, Not founded upon human consanguinity. It is a spirit, not a blood relation, Superior to family and station. -- Henry David Thoreau
Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know. -- Henry David Thoreau
When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living ... I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do. -- Henry David Thoreau
Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it. -- Henry David Thoreau
A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter. -- Henry David Thoreau
The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field. -- Henry David Thoreau
Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. -- Henry David Thoreau
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. -- Henry David Thoreau
The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects,of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he. -- Henry David Thoreau
The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. -- Henry David Thoreau
We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn. -- Henry David Thoreau
In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. -- Henry David Thoreau
That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline. -- Henry David Thoreau
When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it. -- Henry David Thoreau
Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion,
as if the short spring days were an eternity. -- Henry David Thoreau
He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. Butwe would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics. -- Henry David Thoreau
I wanted to live deep and suck out the all the marrow of life ( ... ). -- Henry David Thoreau
No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. -- Henry David Thoreau
He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience. -- Henry David Thoreau
Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe. -- Henry David Thoreau
I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion. -- Henry David Thoreau
The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect. -- Henry David Thoreau
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,
a denizen of the woods. "The pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him. -- Henry David Thoreau
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. -- Henry David Thoreau
Some travelers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. -- Henry David Thoreau
People seldom hit what they do not aim at. -- Henry David Thoreau
Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? -- Henry David Thoreau
Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead,
equally alive. I think the best parts of Shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. I have found it so. And so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation. -- Henry David Thoreau
In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight. -- Henry David Thoreau
If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. -- Henry David Thoreau
I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again. -- Henry David Thoreau
At present the globe goes with a shattered constitution in its orbit ... No doubt the simple powers of nature, properly directed by man, would make it healthy and a paradise; as the laws of man's own constitution but wait to be obeyed, to restore him to health and happiness. -- Henry David Thoreau
A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living. -- Henry David Thoreau
Friends will be much apart. They will respect more each other's privacy than their communion. -- Henry David Thoreau
What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? -- Henry David Thoreau
If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? -- Henry David Thoreau
The inhabitants of earth behold commonly but the dark and shadowy under side of heaven's pavement; it is only when seen at a favorable angle in the horizon, morning or evening, that some faint streaks of the rich lining of the clouds are revealed. -- Henry David Thoreau
Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it. -- Henry David Thoreau
Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth. -- Henry David Thoreau
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats? -- Henry David Thoreau
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this. -- Henry David Thoreau
As some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that I cannot bear so much society as you can. I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough of it this year I shall cry all the next. -- Henry David Thoreau
We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice. -- Henry David Thoreau
The only remedy for love is to love more. -- Henry David Thoreau
They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy evil, that they may no longer have have it to regret. -- Henry David Thoreau
Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized. -- Henry David Thoreau
There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them. -- Henry David Thoreau
Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever. -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. -- Henry David Thoreau
You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. -- Henry David Thoreau
The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. -- Henry David Thoreau
There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance. -- Henry David Thoreau
How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. -- Henry David Thoreau
Whoever can discern truth has received his commission from a higher source than the chiefest justice in the world who can discernonly law. He finds himself constituted judge of the judge. Strange that it should be necessary to state such simple truths! -- Henry David Thoreau
It seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances, but destined ere-long to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore. -- Henry David Thoreau
I value and trust those w^ho love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover what God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know what I mean. -- Henry David Thoreau
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. -- Henry David Thoreau
I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. -- Henry David Thoreau
But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages. -- Henry David Thoreau
In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. -- Henry David Thoreau
Beauty is where it is perceived. When I see the sun shinning on the woods across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it. -- Henry David Thoreau
He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. -- Henry David Thoreau
I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly masculine, with no sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me, thumoi phileousa te, kedomene te. -- Henry David Thoreau
We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man. -- Henry David Thoreau
The only danger in Friendship is that it will end. -- Henry David Thoreau
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. -- Henry David Thoreau
What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives. -- Henry David Thoreau
Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress. -- Henry David Thoreau
What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation! -- Henry David Thoreau
We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice. -- Henry David Thoreau
It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters. -- Henry David Thoreau
One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then -- Henry David Thoreau
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. -- Henry David Thoreau
Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau
Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law. -- Henry David Thoreau
He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate. -- Henry David Thoreau
We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language. -- Henry David Thoreau
For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation? -- Henry David Thoreau
I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries. -- Henry David Thoreau
No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. -- Henry David Thoreau
The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him. -- Henry David Thoreau
Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse? -- Henry David Thoreau
It's only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. -- Henry David Thoreau
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a spectulator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. -- Henry David Thoreau
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character. -- Henry David Thoreau
Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. -- Henry David Thoreau
The inhabitants of the Cape generally do not complain of their "soil," but will tell you that it is good enough for them to dry their fish on. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. -- Henry David Thoreau
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then! -- Henry David Thoreau
Who hears the fishes when they cry? -- Henry David Thoreau
We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say; the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. They stand many deep. -- Henry David Thoreau
Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing. -- Henry David Thoreau
What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least. -- Henry David Thoreau
October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight. -- Henry David Thoreau
We need the tonic of the wilderness, to wade sometimes in the marsh where the bitten and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. -- Henry David Thoreau
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. -- Henry David Thoreau
Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,
these are some of our astronomers. -- Henry David Thoreau
This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal. -- Henry David Thoreau
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way. -- Henry David Thoreau
A lawyer's truth is not Truth. It is consistency, or consistent expediency -- Henry David Thoreau
I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface ofthings. We think that that is which appears to be. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice. -- Henry David Thoreau
He who owns little is little owned. -- Henry David Thoreau
The way you spend Christmas is far more important than how much. -- Henry David Thoreau
Talk of mysteries! - Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we? -- Henry David Thoreau
I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. -- Henry David Thoreau
The poet's body even is not fed like other men's, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives adivine life. By the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age. -- Henry David Thoreau
The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. -- Henry David Thoreau
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. -- Henry David Thoreau
We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend. -- Henry David Thoreau
In the long run, you hit only what you aim at. -- Henry David Thoreau
If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success. -- Henry David Thoreau
Good religious men, with the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in their pockets. -- Henry David Thoreau
As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society. -- Henry David Thoreau
Having reached the term of his natural life; Mwould it not be truer to say, Having reached the term of his unnatural life? -- Henry David Thoreau
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. -- Henry David Thoreau
As we grow older, we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate than ourselves. -- Henry David Thoreau
The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. -- Henry David Thoreau
If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is a low mist in the woods
It is a good day to study lichens. -- Henry David Thoreau
If however the law is so promulgated that it of necessity makes you an agent of injustices against another, then I say to you ... break the law. -- Henry David Thoreau
Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. It is the only assured tone. There are in it such strains as far surpass anyman's faith in the loftiness of his destiny. Things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn. -- Henry David Thoreau
I think of no news to tell you. It is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. The hens steal their nests, and I steal theireggs still, as formerly. This is what I do with the hands. Ah, labor,
it is a divine institution, and conversation with many men and hens. -- Henry David Thoreau
The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. -- Henry David Thoreau
The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and systematic application of known laws to nature, causes the unknown to reveal themselves. Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method. -- Henry David Thoreau
Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. -- Henry David Thoreau
A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts. -- Henry David Thoreau
The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks;many a poet's stream, floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom. -- Henry David Thoreau
A gun will give you the body, not the bird -- Henry David Thoreau
Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular. -- Henry David Thoreau
Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it ... At last we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. -- Henry David Thoreau
The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. -- Henry David Thoreau
If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow. -- Henry David Thoreau
The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. -- Henry David Thoreau
When I consider that the noble animals have been exterminated here - the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc, etc - I cannot but feel as I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are ... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise. -- Henry David Thoreau
Not secondary to the sun, she gives us his blaze again, Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day ... In Heaven queen she is among the spheres; She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure. -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite. -- Henry David Thoreau
I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way ... But lo! men have become the tools of their tools ... We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. -- Henry David Thoreau
For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. -- Henry David Thoreau
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earths and skies and seas around,
And in my day the sun doth pale his light. -- Henry David Thoreau
It often happens that a man develops a deeper love and friendship with his pet cat or dog than he does with most of the other humans in his life. -- Henry David Thoreau
We make needless ado about capital punishment,
taking lives, when there is no life to take. -- Henry David Thoreau
Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism. -- Henry David Thoreau
My profession is to always find God in nature. -- Henry David Thoreau
Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it? -- Henry David Thoreau
Behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, -- Henry David Thoreau
This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I -- Henry David Thoreau
Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet. -- Henry David Thoreau
I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is absolutely no common sense, it is common non-sense. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. -- Henry David Thoreau
The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. -- Henry David Thoreau
In our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suffered to rust. None will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. Though we have gold to give, they demand only copper. -- Henry David Thoreau
The Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots. -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. -- Henry David Thoreau
Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be. -- Henry David Thoreau
Men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. -- Henry David Thoreau
How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature. -- Henry David Thoreau
The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams. -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not judge men by anything they can do. Their greatest deed is the impression they make on me. -- Henry David Thoreau
The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. -- Henry David Thoreau
He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him every day by day, and the divine being established. -- Henry David Thoreau
We 've wholly forgotten how to die. But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when to end. -- Henry David Thoreau
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I ... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? -- Henry David Thoreau
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. -- Henry David Thoreau
Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. -- Henry David Thoreau
Our molting season, like that of the fouls, must be a crisis in our lives. -- Henry David Thoreau
We saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church. -- Henry David Thoreau
Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. -- Henry David Thoreau
The bluebird carries the sky on his back. -- Henry David Thoreau
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat. -- Henry David Thoreau
What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day? -- Henry David Thoreau
If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer. -- Henry David Thoreau
Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic. -- Henry David Thoreau
If I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. -- Henry David Thoreau
It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself. -- Henry David Thoreau
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man. -- Henry David Thoreau
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. -- Henry David Thoreau
Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. -- Henry David Thoreau
The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants. -- Henry David Thoreau
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off. -- Henry David Thoreau
They make their pride," he said, "in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little." When asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, "The nearest. -- Henry David Thoreau
But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. Now he falls between two stools. -- Henry David Thoreau
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. -- Henry David Thoreau
Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. -- Henry David Thoreau
The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely. -- Henry David Thoreau
The conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over - and it will be called, and will be, "A melancholy accident. -- Henry David Thoreau
The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. -- Henry David Thoreau
All good things are wild and free. -- Henry David Thoreau
In short, all good things are wild and free. -- Henry David Thoreau
SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. -- Henry David Thoreau
it is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste. The Saunter-er's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. -- Henry David Thoreau
Wealth can't buy heath, but heath can buy wealth. -- Henry David Thoreau
Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight. -- Henry David Thoreau
Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! -- Henry David Thoreau
One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought. -- Henry David Thoreau
Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged. -- Henry David Thoreau
You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing. -- Henry David Thoreau
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. -- Henry David Thoreau
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau
Objects of charity are not guests. -- Henry David Thoreau
To say that God has given a man many and great talents frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands. -- Henry David Thoreau
Ktaadnis an Indian word signifying highest land, ... very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, andit will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way. -- Henry David Thoreau
While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally? -- Henry David Thoreau
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. -- Henry David Thoreau
Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art. -- Henry David Thoreau
The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it. -- Henry David Thoreau
I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. -- Henry David Thoreau
Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another. -- Henry David Thoreau
I could lecture on dry oak leaves; I could, but who would hear me? If I were to try it on any large audience, I fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. I should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends. -- Henry David Thoreau
If I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. -- Henry David Thoreau
I should consider it a greater success to interest one wise and earnest soul, than a million unwise and frivolous. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,
is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line. -- Henry David Thoreau
One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something. -- Henry David Thoreau
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. -- Henry David Thoreau
But, on more accounts than one, I had had enough of moose-hunting. I had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had I foreseen it, though I had been willing to learn how the Indian manvred; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen. -- Henry David Thoreau
Linnaeus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his "comb" and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches" and "gauze cap to keep off gnats," with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable. -- Henry David Thoreau
Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it -- Henry David Thoreau
It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. -- Henry David Thoreau
As long as I have the friendship of the sesasons life will never be a burden to me. -- Henry David Thoreau
Art can never match the luxury and superfluity of Nature. In the former all is seen; it cannot afford concealed wealth, and is niggardly in comparison; but Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots. -- Henry David Thoreau
What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,
for there must be subordination,
but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare. -- Henry David Thoreau
Cowards suffer, heroes enjoy. -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which these things would be by me unavoidable. -- Henry David Thoreau
Every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,
shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter acceptas special or general providences; but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. Another deluge would disgrace mankind. -- Henry David Thoreau
Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine. -- Henry David Thoreau
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor. -- Henry David Thoreau
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. -- Henry David Thoreau
When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen. -- Henry David Thoreau
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! -- Henry David Thoreau
I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse. -- Henry David Thoreau
The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last. -- Henry David Thoreau
At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. -- Henry David Thoreau
If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful. -- Henry David Thoreau
The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins. -- Henry David Thoreau
Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything. -- Henry David Thoreau
Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. -- Henry David Thoreau
Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. -- Henry David Thoreau
He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruit of his riches, who summer and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts. -- Henry David Thoreau
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. -- Henry David Thoreau
Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause - nor any charter of immunities and rights. -- Henry David Thoreau
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. -- Henry David Thoreau
I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth. -- Henry David Thoreau
History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,
when did burdock and plantain sprout first? -- Henry David Thoreau
But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire. -- Henry David Thoreau
You don't know your testament when you see it. -- Henry David Thoreau
A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. -- Henry David Thoreau
Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it. -- Henry David Thoreau
A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. -- Henry David Thoreau
Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure. -- Henry David Thoreau
If labor mainly, or to any considerable degree, serves the purpose of a police, to keep men out of mischief, it indicates a rottenness at the foundation of our community. -- Henry David Thoreau
I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here! -- Henry David Thoreau
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town ... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety. -- Henry David Thoreau
That he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. -- Henry David Thoreau
A wise man has doubts even in his best moments. Real truth is always accompanied by hesitations. If I could not hesitate, I could not believe. -- Henry David Thoreau
We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven -- Henry David Thoreau
It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are. -- Henry David Thoreau
Morality is how you go about getting what you want without screwing anybody to get it. -- Henry David Thoreau
In respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. In the most civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine. -- Henry David Thoreau
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day. -- Henry David Thoreau
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. -- Henry David Thoreau
As for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plane at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top. -- Henry David Thoreau
Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. ... We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them. -- Henry David Thoreau
I did not go to Boston, for with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home. -- Henry David Thoreau
To live a better life,
this surely can be done. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is no history of how bad became better. -- Henry David Thoreau
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us. -- Henry David Thoreau
For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. -- Henry David Thoreau
They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures and makeshifts merely. They put off the day of settlement, and meanwhile the debt accumulates. -- Henry David Thoreau
Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is the stars as not yet known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows. -- Henry David Thoreau
I have made a short excursion into the new world which the Indian dwells in, or is. He begins where we leave off. -- Henry David Thoreau
Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. -- Henry David Thoreau
They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures. -- Henry David Thoreau
Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed; it is itself a reform. -- Henry David Thoreau
Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarelyseem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. He is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do. -- Henry David Thoreau
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! -- Henry David Thoreau
There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation. -- Henry David Thoreau
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined. -- Henry David Thoreau
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. -- Henry David Thoreau
The future is too soon the past. So make perseverance your excellence and go confidently in the direction of your dreams. -- Henry David Thoreau
We have need to be as sturdy pioneers still as Miles Standish, or Church, or Lovewell. We are to follow on another trail, it is true, but one as convenient for ambushes. What if the Indians are exterminated, are not savages as grim prowling about the clearings today? -- Henry David Thoreau
Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. -- Henry David Thoreau
Read not the Times, read the Eternities. -- Henry David Thoreau
I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. -- Henry David Thoreau
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them. -- Henry David Thoreau
Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport. -- Henry David Thoreau
Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived. -- Henry David Thoreau
All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature's health orsound state. -- Henry David Thoreau
So hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip ... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. -- Henry David Thoreau
Give me the old familiar world, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten. -- Henry David Thoreau
Our table was a large piece of freshly peeled birch bark, laid wrong side up, and our breakfast consisted of hard-bread, fried pork, and strong coffee well sweetened, in which we did not miss the milk. -- Henry David Thoreau
The stars are God's dreams, thoughts remembered in the silence of his night. -- Henry David Thoreau
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing. -- Henry David Thoreau
We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence on the globe. -- Henry David Thoreau
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together. -- Henry David Thoreau
A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness - breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him. -- Henry David Thoreau
I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in it's gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals. -- Henry David Thoreau
Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote. -- Henry David Thoreau
What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth? -- Henry David Thoreau
Poverty ... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest. -- Henry David Thoreau
So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell. -- Henry David Thoreau
He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When -- Henry David Thoreau
As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis. -- Henry David Thoreau
This [...] government [...] has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man cam bend it to his will. -- Henry David Thoreau
If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. -- Henry David Thoreau
Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green. -- Henry David Thoreau
The lover wants no partiality. He says, Be so kind as to be just. -- Henry David Thoreau
A man can suffocate on courtesy. -- Henry David Thoreau
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. -- Henry David Thoreau
As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. -- Henry David Thoreau
As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as theevening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour. -- Henry David Thoreau
Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. -- Henry David Thoreau
The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact ... In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. -- Henry David Thoreau
A bore is someone who takes away my solitude and doesn't give me companionship in return -- Henry David Thoreau
The biggest happiness is when at the end of the year you feel better than at the beginning -- Henry David Thoreau
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. -- Henry David Thoreau
I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. -- Henry David Thoreau
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. -- Henry David Thoreau
We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still -- Henry David Thoreau
I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. -- Henry David Thoreau
No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. -- Henry David Thoreau
No man ever followed his genius til it misled him. -- Henry David Thoreau
The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. -- Henry David Thoreau
This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us ... But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever. -- Henry David Thoreau
The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. -- Henry David Thoreau
The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth. -- Henry David Thoreau
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. -- Henry David Thoreau
As a preacher, I should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. Let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skillful economist at once. -- Henry David Thoreau
Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is not one kind of food for all men. You must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. The laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary. -- Henry David Thoreau
The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body. -- Henry David Thoreau
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. -- Henry David Thoreau
My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. -- Henry David Thoreau
I noticed, as I had done before, that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight, and that they began again in the morning. Nature is thus merciful. But apparently they need rest as well as we. -- Henry David Thoreau
For if the truth were known, Love cannot speak, But only thinks and does; Though surely out 'twill leak Without the help of Greek, Or any tongue. -- Henry David Thoreau
The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres. -- Henry David Thoreau
Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces. -- Henry David Thoreau
A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. -- Henry David Thoreau
Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all? -- Henry David Thoreau
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. -- Henry David Thoreau
I have great faith in a seed. -- Henry David Thoreau
We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care for the Bible, but we do care for the newspaper.At any meeting of politicianshow impertinent it would be to quote from the Bible! how pertinent to quote from a newspaper or from the Constitution! -- Henry David Thoreau
Whatever beauty we behold, the more it is distant, serene, and cold, the purer and more durable it is. It is better to warm ourselves with ice than with fire. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is no remedy for love but to love more. -- Henry David Thoreau
The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land. -- Henry David Thoreau
It seems as if the more youthful and impressible streams can hardly resist the numerous invitations and temptations to leave theirnative beds and run down their neighbors' channels. -- Henry David Thoreau
You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society. -- Henry David Thoreau
The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends. -- Henry David Thoreau
How godlike, how immortal, is he? -- Henry David Thoreau
Carlyle must undoubtedly plead guilty to the charge of mannerism. He not only has his vein, but his peculiar manner of working it.He has a style which can be imitated, and sometimes is an imitator of himself. -- Henry David Thoreau
The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. -- Henry David Thoreau
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. -- Henry David Thoreau
The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is far more independent to travel on foot. You have to sacrifice so much to the horse. You cannot choose the most agreeable places in which to spend the noon., commanding the finest views, because commonly there is no water there, or you cannot get there with your horse. -- Henry David Thoreau
There are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest communications we only lend a silent ear. -- Henry David Thoreau
Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. -- Henry David Thoreau
An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe. I have a fancyfor building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me. -- Henry David Thoreau
When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university. -- Henry David Thoreau
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. -- Henry David Thoreau
The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen. -- Henry David Thoreau
There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only. -- Henry David Thoreau
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? -- Henry David Thoreau
But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. -- Henry David Thoreau
By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It -- Henry David Thoreau
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. -- Henry David Thoreau
When I think of the gold-diggers and the Mormons, the slaves and the slave-holders and the flibustiers, I naturally dream of a glorious private life. No, I am not patriotic. -- Henry David Thoreau
For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself -- Henry David Thoreau
Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head. -- Henry David Thoreau
Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. -- Henry David Thoreau
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. -- Henry David Thoreau
Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit ... What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? -- Henry David Thoreau
You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; may be you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. -- Henry David Thoreau
Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death -- Henry David Thoreau
Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors. -- Henry David Thoreau
If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs. -- Henry David Thoreau
The secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in the mind -- Henry David Thoreau
Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory. -- Henry David Thoreau
Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree. -- Henry David Thoreau
All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy. -- Henry David Thoreau
The Heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high. -- Henry David Thoreau
It's circumstantial evidence, like finding a trout in the milk. -- Henry David Thoreau
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk. -- Henry David Thoreau
I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower. -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are? -- Henry David Thoreau
Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars. -- Henry David Thoreau
What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? -- Henry David Thoreau
Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing. -- Henry David Thoreau
Wealth is measured by the level of experience in all aspects of life -- Henry David Thoreau
I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance. [17] -- Henry David Thoreau
Let go of the past and live the future ... Live the life you imagined. -- Henry David Thoreau
The inhabitants of Canada appeared to be suffering between two fires,
the soldiery and the priesthood. -- Henry David Thoreau
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world. -- Henry David Thoreau
Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food -- Henry David Thoreau
How can any man be weak who dares to be at all? -- Henry David Thoreau
To the man who cherishes a secret in his breast, there is a still greater secret unexplored. Our most indifferent acts may be a matter for secrecy, but whatever we do with the utmost truthfulness and integrity, by virtue of its pureness, must be transparent as light. -- Henry David Thoreau
The fate of the country ... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning. -- Henry David Thoreau
We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be. -- Henry David Thoreau
Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves ... -- Henry David Thoreau
In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. -- Henry David Thoreau
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God. -- Henry David Thoreau
Count your age with friends but not with years. -- Henry David Thoreau
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. -- Henry David Thoreau
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation -- Henry David Thoreau
All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one ... characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers. -- Henry David Thoreau
Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state ... -- Henry David Thoreau
A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. -- Henry David Thoreau
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. -- Henry David Thoreau
The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely. -- Henry David Thoreau
Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all - I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. -- Henry David Thoreau
I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. -- Henry David Thoreau
For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. -- Henry David Thoreau
Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick. -- Henry David Thoreau
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. -- Henry David Thoreau
Our last deed, like the young of the land crab, wends its way to the sea of cause and effect as soon as born, and makes a drop there to eternity. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or acknowledge the personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake. -- Henry David Thoreau
Men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; -- Henry David Thoreau
Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still entirely unknown. -- Henry David Thoreau
What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. -- Henry David Thoreau
I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too. -- Henry David Thoreau
The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. -- Henry David Thoreau
The world rests on principles. -- Henry David Thoreau
A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will. -- Henry David Thoreau
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes. -- Henry David Thoreau
I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, -- Henry David Thoreau
Music is the crystallization of sound. -- Henry David Thoreau
I love the broad margin to my life. -- Henry David Thoreau
I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery. -- Henry David Thoreau
I love a broad margin to my life. -- Henry David Thoreau
There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. -- Henry David Thoreau
So near along life's stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin; and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. -- Henry David Thoreau
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. -- Henry David Thoreau
Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? -- Henry David Thoreau
If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there arenight owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. -- Henry David Thoreau
I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is. -- Henry David Thoreau
I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither. -- Henry David Thoreau
Building a team is just the beginning, keeping it together means progress and working together is success. -- Henry David Thoreau
My friend is one ... who take me for what I am. -- Henry David Thoreau
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. -- Henry David Thoreau
Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night, dragging an engine at their heels, I'm astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve. -- Henry David Thoreau
When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man? -- Henry David Thoreau
This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it. -- Henry David Thoreau
When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes
remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education
make them hunters. -- Henry David Thoreau
O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether. -- Henry David Thoreau
Hence it will not do for the Landlord to possess too fine a nature ... He must have no idiosyncracies, no particular bents or tendencies to this or that, but a general, uniform, and healthy development, such as his portly person indicates, offering himself equally on all sides to men. -- Henry David Thoreau
All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. -- Henry David Thoreau
Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder. -- Henry David Thoreau
I am a happy camper so I guess I'm doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder. -- Henry David Thoreau
For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect. -- Henry David Thoreau
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched. -- Henry David Thoreau
Truth, Goodness, Beauty - those celestial thrins,Continually are born; e'en now the Universe,With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles,Its joy confesses at their recent birth. -- Henry David Thoreau
We commonly do not remember that it is ... always the first person that is speaking. -- Henry David Thoreau
It has come to this, that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature. -- Henry David Thoreau
On the morning of many a first spring day ... the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. -- Henry David Thoreau
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? -- Henry David Thoreau
The highest condition of art is artlessness. -- Henry David Thoreau
The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively,as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned. -- Henry David Thoreau
There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill. -- Henry David Thoreau
The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics. -- Henry David Thoreau
Take Time by the forelock. It is also the safest part to take a serpent by. -- Henry David Thoreau
The orator puts off his individuality, and is then most eloquent when most silent. He listens while he speaks, and is a hearer along with his audience. -- Henry David Thoreau
But the impressions which the morning makes vanish with its dews, and not even the most "persevering mortal" can preserve the memory of its freshness to midday. -- Henry David Thoreau
A man's riches are based on what he can do without. -- Henry David Thoreau
If one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. Let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them. -- Henry David Thoreau
Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,
if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world. -- Henry David Thoreau
I seem to have dodged all my days with one or two persons, and lived upon expectation,
as if the bud would surely blossom; and soI am content to live. -- Henry David Thoreau
New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country. -- Henry David Thoreau
Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary. -- Henry David Thoreau
The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. -- Henry David Thoreau
Instead of singing, like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so I had my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. -- Henry David Thoreau
Birds never sing in caves. -- Henry David Thoreau
The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame ...
and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history. -- Henry David Thoreau
That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience. -- Henry David Thoreau
Woe be to the generation that lets any higher faculty in its midst go unemployed. -- Henry David Thoreau
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. -- Henry David Thoreau
Whatever is, and is not ashamed to be, is good. -- Henry David Thoreau
Stuff a cold and starve a cold are but two ways. They are the two practices, both always in full blast. Yet you must take the advice of the one school as if there was no other. -- Henry David Thoreau
The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages. -- Henry David Thoreau
While my friend was my friend, he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him. When he became my enemy, he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow. -- Henry David Thoreau
To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. -- Henry David Thoreau
This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge ... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature. -- Henry David Thoreau
The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. -- Henry David Thoreau