Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

Henry David Thoreau
There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.

Henry David Thoreau
The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.

Henry David Thoreau
How many fine thoughts has every man had! How few fine thoughts are expressed!

Henry David Thoreau
The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination,whose vast abdomens betray them.

Henry David Thoreau
Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,--these are some of our astronomers.

Henry David Thoreau
It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.

Henry David Thoreau
I find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. It is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind; onlyreaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. Our conversation is a smooth, and civil, and never-ending speculation merely.

Henry David Thoreau
I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.

Henry David Thoreau
My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground, as chestnuts, etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.

Henry David Thoreau
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Henry David Thoreau
Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.

Henry David Thoreau
At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

Henry David Thoreau
Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

Henry David Thoreau
What is the use of going right over the old track again? There is an adder in the path which your own feet have worn. You must make tracks into the Unknown.

Henry David Thoreau
That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia.

Henry David Thoreau
I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.

Henry David Thoreau
I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.

Henry David Thoreau
There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.

Henry David Thoreau
I have heard of a minister, who had been a fisherman, being settled in Bridgewater for as long a time as he could tell a cod froma haddock. Generous as it seems, this condition would empty most country pulpits forthwith, for it is long since the fishers of men were fishermen.

Henry David Thoreau
It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.

Henry David Thoreau
When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.

Henry David Thoreau
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.

Henry David Thoreau
It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose.

Henry David Thoreau
Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?

Henry David Thoreau
All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature's health orsound state.

Henry David Thoreau
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful - while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with - he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

Henry David Thoreau
The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.

Henry David Thoreau
The very austerity of the Brahmans is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler luxury. Wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more refined pleasure. Their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream.

Henry David Thoreau
Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

Henry David Thoreau