Henry David Thoreau - A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

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A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. It requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate.

Henry David Thoreau
Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.

Henry David Thoreau
For a companion, I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius. Such a one will always be rightly tolerant.It is suicide, and corrupts good manners, to welcome any less than this. I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance. If you would not stop to look at me, but look whither I am looking, and farther, then my education could not dispense with your company.

Henry David Thoreau
To say that God has given a man many and great talents frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands.

Henry David Thoreau
However, our fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it.

Henry David Thoreau
Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.

Henry David Thoreau
By one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses.

Henry David Thoreau
The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.

Henry David Thoreau
Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat andpotatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.

Henry David Thoreau
A simple woman down in Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveler, supposing that I had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again.

Henry David Thoreau
Good religious men, with the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in their pockets.

Henry David Thoreau
As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

Henry David Thoreau
All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.

Henry David Thoreau
There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.

Henry David Thoreau
On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.

Henry David Thoreau
If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.

Henry David Thoreau
Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope.

Henry David Thoreau
If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.

Henry David Thoreau
A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.

Henry David Thoreau
The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.

Henry David Thoreau
My Friend is that one whom I can associate with my choicest thought.

Henry David Thoreau
As for the tenets of the Brahmans, we are not so much concerned to know what doctrines they held, as that they were held by any. We can tolerate all philosophies.... It is the attitude of these men, more than any communication which they make, that attracts us.

Henry David Thoreau
It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.

Henry David Thoreau
Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. He needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth.

Henry David Thoreau
What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, love their Friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their Friendship for one another. They are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other's presence. I do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man.

Henry David Thoreau
Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veilhangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.

Henry David Thoreau
Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.

Henry David Thoreau
The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth.

Henry David Thoreau
In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result,but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.

Henry David Thoreau
The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

Henry David Thoreau