Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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Are you in want of amusement nowadays? Then play a little at the game of getting a living. There was never anything equal to it. Do it temperately, though, and don't sweat.

Henry David Thoreau
Yet we must try the harder, the less the prospect of success.

Henry David Thoreau
Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

Henry David Thoreau
When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes-- remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education-- make them hunters.

Henry David Thoreau
The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them; they are their true clothes.

Henry David Thoreau
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers

Henry David Thoreau
Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Henry David Thoreau
The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.

Henry David Thoreau
It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.

Henry David Thoreau
I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again.

Henry David Thoreau
Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion,--as if the short spring days were an eternity.

Henry David Thoreau
As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility.

Henry David Thoreau
I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface ofthings. We think that that is which appears to be.

Henry David Thoreau
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge college is as solitary as a dervis in the desert.

Henry David Thoreau
A man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it.

Henry David Thoreau
Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.

Henry David Thoreau
Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime?

Henry David Thoreau
If one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. Let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them.

Henry David Thoreau
The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, andagain, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him.

Henry David Thoreau
Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.

Henry David Thoreau
When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in.... How beautifully they go to their graves! How gently lay themselves down and turn to mould. They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when people, with our boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and ripe-with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed our bodies.

Henry David Thoreau
I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.

Henry David Thoreau
In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.

Henry David Thoreau
In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

Henry David Thoreau
A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set. Wheels of storm-chariots. The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-stars. A s surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six...

Henry David Thoreau
A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

Henry David Thoreau
Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.

Henry David Thoreau
It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself.

Henry David Thoreau
He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.

Henry David Thoreau
What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men?

Henry David Thoreau