Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams.

Henry David Thoreau
The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

Henry David Thoreau
Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself.

Henry David Thoreau
The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.

Henry David Thoreau
A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

Henry David Thoreau
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

Henry David Thoreau
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Henry David Thoreau
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Henry David Thoreau
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Henry David Thoreau
There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.

Henry David Thoreau
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

Henry David Thoreau
Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

Henry David Thoreau
Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Henry David Thoreau
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Henry David Thoreau
The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

Henry David Thoreau
How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?

Henry David Thoreau
A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subjectfor Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.

Henry David Thoreau
All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.

Henry David Thoreau
A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no otherlaw nor kindness.

Henry David Thoreau
We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.

Henry David Thoreau
It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness - breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him.

Henry David Thoreau
The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.

Henry David Thoreau
Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.

Henry David Thoreau
Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.

Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism.

Henry David Thoreau
The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.

Henry David Thoreau
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who have understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,-who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.

Henry David Thoreau
The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.

Henry David Thoreau
If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

Henry David Thoreau
In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts?something for conversation in winter evenings.

Henry David Thoreau