Henry David Thoreau - Man Quotes

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Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man travel on foot along the coastand tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man's Land.

Henry David Thoreau
Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on? Grade the ground first. If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him … he will be surrounded by grandeur. He is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, — How sweet this crust is!

Henry David Thoreau
A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

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
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
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
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 are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes.

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

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
The same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.

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
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
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
There are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest communications we only lend a silent ear.

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

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
Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case.

Henry David Thoreau
I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.

Henry David Thoreau
It is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.

Henry David Thoreau
Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

Henry David Thoreau
There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

Henry David Thoreau
I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all.

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

Henry David Thoreau
I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer.

Henry David Thoreau
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

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