Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character — his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.

Henry David Thoreau
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety.

Henry David Thoreau
It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.

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
Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

Henry David Thoreau
The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Henry David Thoreau
I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

Henry David Thoreau
Why have we ever slandered the outward? The perception of surfaces will always have the effect of miracle to a sane sense.

Henry David Thoreau
Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

Henry David Thoreau
Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?

Henry David Thoreau
Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!....

Henry David Thoreau
God is alone,-but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion.

Henry David Thoreau
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

Henry David Thoreau
Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

Henry David Thoreau
The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

Henry David Thoreau
"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."

Henry David Thoreau
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Henry David Thoreau
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, — that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.

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
Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.

Henry David Thoreau
Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

Henry David Thoreau
Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing.

Henry David Thoreau
The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but last fruits also.

Henry David Thoreau
Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.

Henry David Thoreau
One is wise to cultivate the tree that bears fruit in our soul.

Henry David Thoreau
Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.

Henry David Thoreau
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

Henry David Thoreau
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

Henry David Thoreau
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Henry David Thoreau
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. It is as common as life.

Henry David Thoreau