Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.

Henry David Thoreau
A kitten is so flexible that she is almost double; the hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the forepart plays. She does not discover that her tail belongs to her until you tread on it.

Henry David Thoreau
The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.

Henry David Thoreau
My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature.

Henry David Thoreau
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Henry David Thoreau
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

Henry David Thoreau
I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.

Henry David Thoreau
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Henry David Thoreau
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

Henry David Thoreau
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve.

Henry David Thoreau
I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

Henry David Thoreau
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

Henry David Thoreau
However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Henry David Thoreau
What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

Henry David Thoreau
I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.

Henry David Thoreau
Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

Henry David Thoreau
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Henry David Thoreau
Our molting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives.

Henry David Thoreau
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.

Henry David Thoreau
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.

Henry David Thoreau
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World

Henry David Thoreau
I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Henry David Thoreau
The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.

Henry David Thoreau
In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.

Henry David Thoreau
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Their authors are a natural irresistible aristocracy in every society, and more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Henry David Thoreau
Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.

Henry David Thoreau
I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

Henry David Thoreau
The Indian... stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison.

Henry David Thoreau
I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Henry David Thoreau
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.

Henry David Thoreau