Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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Every child should be encouraged to study not man's system of nature but Nature's.

Henry David Thoreau
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

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
I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.

Henry David Thoreau
My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought - with these I deal.

Henry David Thoreau
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.

Henry David Thoreau
Our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature, which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients.

Henry David Thoreau
There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting, beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what. They were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lines had fallen.

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

Henry David Thoreau
All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.

Henry David Thoreau
Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.

Henry David Thoreau
One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought.

Henry David Thoreau
Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps.

Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

Henry David Thoreau
Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten.

Henry David Thoreau
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Henry David Thoreau
Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called.

Henry David Thoreau
Waves of a serene life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather.

Henry David Thoreau
When asked about life after death:
One world at a time.

Henry David Thoreau
A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

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

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
This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.... But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever.

Henry David Thoreau