Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side.

Henry David Thoreau
Why do you ever mend your clothes, unless that, wearing them, you may mend your ways. Let us sing.

Henry David Thoreau
My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against.

Henry David Thoreau
There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Henry David Thoreau
The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love.

Henry David Thoreau
Astronomy is a fashionable study, patronized by princes, but not fungi.

Henry David Thoreau
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.... Shall we always study to obtain more, and not sometimes be content with less?

Henry David Thoreau
I bought me a spy-glass some weeks since. I buy but a few things, and those not till long after I begin to want them, so that when I do get them I am prepared to make a perfect use of them and extract their whole sweet.

Henry David Thoreau
As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiencesof the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside of time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.

Henry David Thoreau
Friends will be much apart. They will respect more each other's privacy than their communion.

Henry David Thoreau
Trench says a wild man is a willed man. Well, then, a man of will who does what he wills or wishes, a man of hope and of the future tense, for not only the obstinate is willed, but far more the constant and persevering. The obstinate man, properly speaking, is one who will not. The perseverance of the saints is positive willedness, not a mere passive willingness. The fates are wild, for they will; and the Almighty is wild above all, as fate is.

Henry David Thoreau
We 've wholly forgotten how to die. But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when to end.

Henry David Thoreau
The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.

Henry David Thoreau
For the most part we stupidly confound one man with another. The dull distinguish only races or nations, or at most classes, but the wise man, individuals.

Henry David Thoreau
Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

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
There is not one kind of food for all men. You must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. The laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary.

Henry David Thoreau
The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

Henry David Thoreau
Winter is the time for study, you know, and the colder it is the more studious we are.

Henry David Thoreau
To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever. It is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had.

Henry David Thoreau
In the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways.

Henry David Thoreau
The very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age.

Henry David Thoreau
Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.

Henry David Thoreau
If Nature is our mother, then God is our father.

Henry David Thoreau
On the 31st of August, 1846, I left Concord in Massachusetts for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine,... I proposed to make excursions to Mount Ktaadn, the second highest mountain in New England, about thirty miles distant, and to some of the lakes of the Penobscot, either alone or with such company as I might pick up there.

Henry David Thoreau
What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?

Henry David Thoreau
Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

Henry David Thoreau
Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest and most familiar reputation.... His recent tracks still give variety to a winter's walk. I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with such a tip-toe of expectation as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair.

Henry David Thoreau
Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but findher our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.

Henry David Thoreau
You have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these American days.... Farmers' sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light.

Henry David Thoreau