Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two.

Henry David Thoreau
The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.

Henry David Thoreau
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

Henry David Thoreau
I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath.

Henry David Thoreau
Men will tell you sometimes that "money's hard." That shows it was not made to eat, I say.... Some of those who sank with the steamer the other day found out that money was heavy too.

Henry David Thoreau
Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.

Henry David Thoreau
Every man should stand for a force which is perfectly irresistible.

Henry David Thoreau
It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.

Henry David Thoreau
Priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. They have no common ground, nor is there any to mediate betweenthem. When the one comes, the other goes. They could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one's profession is a satire on the other's, and either's success would be the other's failure.

Henry David Thoreau
While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Henry David Thoreau
It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.

Henry David Thoreau
It is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an irishman his spade. To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to workour mines of gold known only to ourselves far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of our freedom to make that known.

Henry David Thoreau
Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.

Henry David Thoreau
There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.

Henry David Thoreau
When I think of the gold-diggers and the Mormons, the slaves and the slave-holders and the flibustiers, I naturally dream of a glorious private life. No, I am not patriotic.

Henry David Thoreau
Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness.

Henry David Thoreau
I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.

Henry David Thoreau
There must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a winter morning.

Henry David Thoreau
The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to the world's standard, they are always insane. Even savages have indirectly surmised as much.

Henry David Thoreau
Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man travel on foot along the coastand tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man's Land.

Henry David Thoreau
The philosopher's conception of things will, above all, be truer than other men's, and his philosophy will subordinate all the circumstances of life. To live like a philosopher is to live, not foolishly, like other men, but wisely and according to universal laws.

Henry David Thoreau
Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. Most people here believe in a spiritual world... in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison.

Henry David Thoreau
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

Henry David Thoreau
For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?

Henry David Thoreau
Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.

Henry David Thoreau
Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.

Henry David Thoreau
In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,--and they are themselves so much the better morally for it.

Henry David Thoreau
One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

Henry David Thoreau
A true politeness does not result from any hasty and artificial polishing, it is true, but grows naturally in characters of the right grain and quality, through a long fronting of men and events, and rubbing on good and bad fortune.

Henry David Thoreau
Who watched the forms of the clouds over this part of the earth a thousand years ago? Who watches them to-day?

Henry David Thoreau