Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.

Henry David Thoreau
Stuff a cold and starve a cold are but two ways. They are the two practices, both always in full blast. Yet you must take the advice of the one school as if there was no other.

Henry David Thoreau
I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough.

Henry David Thoreau
Let a slight snow come and cover the earth, and the tracks of men will show how little the woods and fields are frequented.

Henry David Thoreau
Nothing but great antiquity can make graveyards interesting to me. I have no friends there.

Henry David Thoreau
Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.

Henry David Thoreau
We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between theilliterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were.

Henry David Thoreau
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success.

Henry David Thoreau
So far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise of traders.

Henry David Thoreau
There is reason in the distinction of civil and uncivil. The manners are sometimes so rough a rind that we doubt whether they cover any core or sap-wood at all.

Henry David Thoreau
Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.

Henry David Thoreau
There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,--is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.

Henry David Thoreau
Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.

Henry David Thoreau
If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow.

Henry David Thoreau
A man's social and spiritual discipline must answer to his corporeal. He must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he wouldlie on a hard bed. He must drink cold water for his only beverage. So he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. He must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends.

Henry David Thoreau
If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

Henry David Thoreau
It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.

Henry David Thoreau
Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.

Henry David Thoreau
Science knows that the isolated mountains in the horizon are but portions of an unseen range.

Henry David Thoreau
How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.

Henry David Thoreau
What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense they were not men at all.

Henry David Thoreau
The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.

Henry David Thoreau
The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusettsis one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.

Henry David Thoreau
The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper,... in the poet's life. It is what hehas become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince's gallery.

Henry David Thoreau
There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony.

Henry David Thoreau
I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here!

Henry David Thoreau
As a preacher, I should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. Let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skillful economist at once.

Henry David Thoreau
Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarelyseem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. He is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do.

Henry David Thoreau
How many things are now at loose ends! Who knows which way the wind will blow tomorrow?

Henry David Thoreau
How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint.

Henry David Thoreau