Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.

To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.

Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.

If you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland Light, inTruro.

There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art,... one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate.

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

Duty is one and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can it ever be disregarded with impunity.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough of nature.

Spring-an experience in immortality.

I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance.

The only danger in Friendship is that it will end.

When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.

As all curves have reference to their centres or foci, so all beauty of character has reference to the soul, and is a graceful gesture of recognition or waving of the body toward it.

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

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.

If one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. Let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them.

Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.

Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps.

When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.

Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.

I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

I learned what it is to live in the open air, and I learned that our lives are domestic in more sense than we think.

The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor.

What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?

Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.

Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.

I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.

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.

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.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.