Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.

Henry David Thoreau
Life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting.... We have not got half-way to dawn yet.

Henry David Thoreau
I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.

Henry David Thoreau
There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

Henry David Thoreau
Even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. We do not wish for Friends to feed and clothe our bodies-neighbors are kind enough for that-but to do the like office to our spirits.

Henry David Thoreau
Many expressions in the New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. It never reflects, but it repents. There is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience.

Henry David Thoreau
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman;... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.

Henry David Thoreau
But why should not the New Englander try new adventures - not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards - and raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men.

Henry David Thoreau
I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.

Henry David Thoreau
With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.

Henry David Thoreau
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?

Henry David Thoreau
We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love.

Henry David Thoreau
What have I to do with plows? I cut another furrow than you see.

Henry David Thoreau
It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.

Henry David Thoreau
The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements.

Henry David Thoreau
Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations tomen; his labor would be depreciated in the market.
He has no time to be anything but a machine.

Henry David Thoreau
Unless the human race perspire more than I do, there is no occasion to live by the sweat of their brow. If men cannot get on without money (the smallest amount will suffice), the truest method of earning it is by working as a laborer at one dollar per day. You are least dependent so; I speak as an expert, having used several kinds of labor.

Henry David Thoreau
Commonly the flakes reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, comparatively without order or beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age.

Henry David Thoreau
We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.

Henry David Thoreau
In our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suffered to rust. None will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. Though we have gold to give, they demand only copper.

Henry David Thoreau
While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognitato them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.

Henry David Thoreau
The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.

Henry David Thoreau
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it.

Henry David Thoreau
The higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height there is no change.

Henry David Thoreau
All the past is here, present to be tried; let it approve itself if it can.

Henry David Thoreau
The poet's body even is not fed like other men's, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives adivine life. By the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age.

Henry David Thoreau
This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal.

Henry David Thoreau
The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.

Henry David Thoreau
Men commonly couple with their idea of marriage a slight degree at least of sensuality; but every lover, the world over, believesin its inconceivable purity.

Henry David Thoreau
The still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel.

Henry David Thoreau