Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Man's moral nature is a riddle which only eternity can solve.

Count your age with friends but not with years.

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.

The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.

The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what we do; and yet how much is not done by us!

If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.

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.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.

Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.

We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.

The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence.

The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.

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.

Heal yourselves, doctors; by God I live.

Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.

In the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, I fear, men never attain to.

In my cheapest moments I am apt to think that it is n't my business to be "seeking the spirit," but as much its business to be seeking me.

One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man.

Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.

The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.

Let the beautiful laws prevail. Let us not weary ourselves by resisting them.

In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only.

Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.

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.

The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.

It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.

Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.

There is no history of how bad became better.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.

What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?

All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.

A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.

Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them.

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?

How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.

How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!

Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport.

I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.

For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?

Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.

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.

The same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.

The theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny accomplishment. It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so-called practical.

A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.

To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions.