Henry David Thoreau Quotes - Page 2

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.

But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party.

Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.

We are more of the earth,Farther from heaven these days.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man -- a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

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.

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.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life.

When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here - the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country... Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all it's warriors...I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at...

Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.

My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

City life - millions of people being lonesome together.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

When I would recreate myself I seek the darkest wood the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength the marrow of Nature.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or temple on earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.

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 thumbnail.

I think that there is nothing not even crime more opposed to poetry to philosophy ay to life itself than this incessant business.

If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know how much truth is stronger than errors, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may Old time is still a-flying. And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.

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.

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to re-create his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him--Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.--But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.

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..

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

To be awake is to be alive.

I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly

A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.

Philanthropy is. . . greatly overrated. A pain in the gut is not sympathy for the underprivileged, but the result of eating a green apple; the philanthropist gives to ease his own pain.

A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

...is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.