Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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The wise are not so much wiser than others as respecters of their own wisdom.

Henry David Thoreau
Especially the transcendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible.

Henry David Thoreau
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

Henry David Thoreau
That we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have little faithfulness. By faithfulness faith is earned.

Henry David Thoreau
I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.

Henry David Thoreau
Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirth-fulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.

Henry David Thoreau
I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.

Henry David Thoreau
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.

Henry David Thoreau
If labor mainly, or to any considerable degree, serves the purpose of a police, to keep men out of mischief, it indicates a rottenness at the foundation of our community.

Henry David Thoreau
Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.

Henry David Thoreau
Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and consciousblasphemy or irreverence; but of indirect and habitual, enough. Where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to Him that made him?

Henry David Thoreau
The cat-tail down puffs and swells in your hand like a mist, or the conjurer's trick of filling a hat with feathers, for when you have rubbed off but a thimbleful, and can close and conceal the wound completely, the expanded down fills your hand to overflowing.

Henry David Thoreau
Such is beauty ever,-neither here nor there, now nor then,-neither in Rome nor in Athens, but wherever there is a soul to admire.

Henry David Thoreau
If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.

Henry David Thoreau
We perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history.

Henry David Thoreau
A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.

Henry David Thoreau
Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse.

Henry David Thoreau
It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver.

Henry David Thoreau
Carlyle must undoubtedly plead guilty to the charge of mannerism. He not only has his vein, but his peculiar manner of working it.He has a style which can be imitated, and sometimes is an imitator of himself.

Henry David Thoreau
I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me continually.

Henry David Thoreau
A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.

Henry David Thoreau
To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.

Henry David Thoreau
Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

Henry David Thoreau
Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,--if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world.

Henry David Thoreau
And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.

Henry David Thoreau
Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of Concord, as exhibited in the Revolution, and on later occasions.

Henry David Thoreau
There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite.

Henry David Thoreau
An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe. I have a fancyfor building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me.

Henry David Thoreau
Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their foundation below the frost.

Henry David Thoreau
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich inward.

Henry David Thoreau