Henry David Thoreau Quotes
Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. It is as common as life.
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.
A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.
In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
When any real progress is made, we unlearned and learn anew what we thought we knew before.
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.
Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.
They take great pride in making their dinner cost much; I take my pride in making my dinner cost so little.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.
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.
Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.
Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.
O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.
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
There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.
To be a philosopher... is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.