Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man travel on foot along the coastand tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man's Land.

Henry David Thoreau
It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolizethe whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part.

Henry David Thoreau
A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

Henry David Thoreau
Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

Henry David Thoreau
Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.

Henry David Thoreau
What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse.

Henry David Thoreau
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.

Henry David Thoreau
There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.

Henry David Thoreau
Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Henry David Thoreau
In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.

Henry David Thoreau
Take Time by the forelock. It is also the safest part to take a serpent by.

Henry David Thoreau
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.

Henry David Thoreau
The virtue which we appreciate, we to some extent appropriate.

Henry David Thoreau
By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.

Henry David Thoreau
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

Henry David Thoreau
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them.

Henry David Thoreau
Stuff a cold and starve a cold are but two ways. They are the two practices, both always in full blast. Yet you must take the advice of the one school as if there was no other.

Henry David Thoreau
Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone.

Henry David Thoreau
All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad anddoes me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.

Henry David Thoreau
In a pure society, the subject of marriage would not be so often avoided,--from shame and not from reverence, winked out of sight,and hinted at only; but treated naturally and simply,--perhaps simply avoided like the kindred mysteries. If it cannot be spoken of for shame, how can it be acted of? But, doubtless, there is far more purity, as well as more impurity, than is apparent.

Henry David Thoreau
It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

Henry David Thoreau
Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

Henry David Thoreau
Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems.

Henry David Thoreau
I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced.

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

Henry David Thoreau