Henry David Thoreau Quotes
I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.
It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.
What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.
The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!
Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.
Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!
The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.
It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village; to make any progress between his door and his gate.
But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
We are ashamed of our fear; for we know that a righteous man would not suspect danger nor incur any. Wherever a man feels fear, there is an avenger.
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.
How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.
I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.
if i repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. what demon possessed me that i behaved so well?
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
In my walks, I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe.
There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety.
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
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.
Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what's the hurry?