Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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

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
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 tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.

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
Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle.

Henry David Thoreau
Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps.

Henry David Thoreau
One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought.

Henry David Thoreau
Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.

Henry David Thoreau
All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.

Henry David Thoreau
One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man.

Henry David Thoreau
There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting, beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what. They were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lines had fallen.

Henry David Thoreau
Our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature, which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients.

Henry David Thoreau
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.

Henry David Thoreau
My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought - with these I deal.

Henry David Thoreau
I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.

Henry David Thoreau
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them.

Henry David Thoreau
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

Henry David Thoreau
Every child should be encouraged to study not man's system of nature but Nature's.

Henry David Thoreau
The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit; is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.

Henry David Thoreau
Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.

Henry David Thoreau