Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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What a battle a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array throughthe always hostile country! How many enemies there are to sane thinking! Every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles.

Henry David Thoreau
It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.

Henry David Thoreau
In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

Henry David Thoreau
Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems.

Henry David Thoreau
A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.

Henry David Thoreau
If you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland Light, inTruro.

Henry David Thoreau
It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.

Henry David Thoreau
The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.

Henry David Thoreau
Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called "swamping" it, and they who do the work are called "swampers." I now perceivedthe fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have coöperated with art here.

Henry David Thoreau
The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

Henry David Thoreau
Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum - many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!

Henry David Thoreau
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

Henry David Thoreau
Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

Henry David Thoreau
I am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is. You have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back parts even of many of the old States, to come to that very America which the Northmen, and Cabot, and Gosnold, and Smith, and Raleigh visited.

Henry David Thoreau
Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.

Henry David Thoreau
It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.

Henry David Thoreau
The universe is wider than our views of it.

Henry David Thoreau
One studies books of science merely to learn the language of naturalists, to be able to communicate with them.

Henry David Thoreau
And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt?

Henry David Thoreau
When I hear a grown man or woman say, "Once I had faith in men, now I have not," I am inclined to ask, "Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?"

Henry David Thoreau
The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet's year is completed, it will be found to be central.

Henry David Thoreau
As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only the subtlest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky.

Henry David Thoreau
To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another.

Henry David Thoreau
Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline.

Henry David Thoreau
Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

Henry David Thoreau
I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.

Henry David Thoreau
If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention

Henry David Thoreau
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!

Henry David Thoreau
Where is the "unexplored land" but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is "unexplored land," to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.

Henry David Thoreau
Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whale-bone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have "seen the elephant"? These are pretty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones.

Henry David Thoreau