Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.

Henry David Thoreau
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

Henry David Thoreau
This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.

Henry David Thoreau
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Henry David Thoreau
We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Henry David Thoreau
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Henry David Thoreau
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

Henry David Thoreau
To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity

Henry David Thoreau
The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Henry David Thoreau
Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

Henry David Thoreau
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Henry David Thoreau
It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.

Henry David Thoreau
The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Henry David Thoreau
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Henry David Thoreau
As we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the Merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons; but we were the truest observers of this sunny day

Henry David Thoreau
I have a room all to myself; it is nature. It is a place beyond the jurisdiction of human governments. There is a prairie beyond your laws. Nature is a prairie for outlaws.

Henry David Thoreau
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.

Henry David Thoreau
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Henry David Thoreau
In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed.

Henry David Thoreau
Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Henry David Thoreau
True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

Henry David Thoreau
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau
So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

Henry David Thoreau
I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

Henry David Thoreau
The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

Henry David Thoreau
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Henry David Thoreau
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

Henry David Thoreau
As for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I don't think much of that.

Henry David Thoreau