Henry David Thoreau Quotes

1,894 Sourced Quotes

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

Henry David Thoreau
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

Henry David Thoreau
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Henry David Thoreau
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Henry David Thoreau
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Henry David Thoreau
There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.

Henry David Thoreau
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

Henry David Thoreau
Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

Henry David Thoreau
Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

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

Henry David Thoreau
The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

Henry David Thoreau
How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?

Henry David Thoreau
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

Henry David Thoreau
I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

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

Henry David Thoreau
In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about.

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