Henry David Thoreau - Man Quotes

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I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious effort.

Henry David Thoreau
A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.

Henry David Thoreau
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts - a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.

Henry David Thoreau
The strongest wind cannot stagger a Spirit; it is a Spirit's breath. A just man's purpose cannot be split on any Grampus or material rock, but itself will split rocks till it succeeds.

Henry David Thoreau
We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

Henry David Thoreau
I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidatesas the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

Henry David Thoreau
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

Henry David Thoreau
These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard.... How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for!

Henry David Thoreau
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather, indicates, his fate.

Henry David Thoreau
Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world?

Henry David Thoreau
Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man?

Henry David Thoreau
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, — that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.

Henry David Thoreau
Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic.

Henry David Thoreau
What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?

Henry David Thoreau
A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

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

Henry David Thoreau
How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding ; How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

Henry David Thoreau
To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.

Henry David Thoreau
Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.

Henry David Thoreau
But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.

Henry David Thoreau
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

Henry David Thoreau
If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,--and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,--it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Henry David Thoreau
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

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
Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness.

Henry David Thoreau
The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.

Henry David Thoreau
It must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses; and the brute degenerates in man's society.

Henry David Thoreau
Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.

Henry David Thoreau
The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.

Henry David Thoreau