David Thoreau Quotes

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise. ~ 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

It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This ~ Henry David Thoreau

The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact ... In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Let go of the past and live the future ... Live the life you imagined. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy - chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man - I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. ~ Henry David Thoreau

This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction. ~ Henry David Thoreau

In the long run, we only hit what we aim at. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I have great faith in a seed. ~ Henry David Thoreau

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth
certainly the machine will wear out ... but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it ~ Henry David Thoreau

There never is but one opportunity of a kind. ~ Henry David Thoreau

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Behold the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The former has nothing to do in this world; the latter is full of activity. The one looks in the sun until his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his westward course. ~ Henry David Thoreau

When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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

Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? ~ Henry David Thoreau

When my legs begin to move, the thoughts begin to flow. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion,
as if the short spring days were an eternity. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. 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. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate tolay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. ~ Henry David Thoreau

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. ~ Henry David Thoreau

To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. ~ Henry David Thoreau

As long as I have the friendship of the sesasons life will never be a burden to me. ~ 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

I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We seem to have forgotten that the expression "a liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. ~ Henry David Thoreau

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. ~ Henry David Thoreau

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. ~ Henry David Thoreau

A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below, - such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics,
we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is madeand at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Man is but the place where I stand ... ~ Henry David Thoreau

The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Life in us is like the water in a river. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Now-a-days, men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear. ~ Henry David Thoreau

My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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

You have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these American days ... Farmers' sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Our panaceas cure but few ails, our general hospitals are private and exclusive. We must set up another Hygeia than is now worshiped. Do not the quacks even direct small doses for children, larger for adults, and larger still for oxen and horses? Let us remember that we are to prescribe for the globe itself. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We slander the hyena; man is the fiercest and cruelest animal. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings,
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows ~ Henry David Thoreau

The very thrills of genius are disorganizing. The body is never quite acclimated to its atmosphere, but how often, succumbs and goes into a decline. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water isbeing warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. ~ Henry David Thoreau

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then! ~ Henry David Thoreau

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,
when did burdock and plantain sprout first? ~ Henry David Thoreau

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere. ~ Henry David Thoreau

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. ~ Henry David Thoreau

How far men go for the material of their houses! The inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine boards for ordinary use. And, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow-points, hatchets, and guns, to point his savageness with. ~ Henry David Thoreau

There is a low mist in the woods
It is a good day to study lichens. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The first pleasant days of spring come out like a squirrel and go in again. ~ Henry David Thoreau

How wholesome winter is, seen far or near; how good, above all mere sentimental, warm-blooded, short-lived, soft-hearted, moral goodness, commonly so called. Give me the goodness which has forgotten its own deeds,
which God has seen to be good, and let be. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We saw men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; ~ Henry David Thoreau

It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were. ~ Henry David Thoreau

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. ~ Henry David Thoreau

My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground, as chestnuts, etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens. ~ Henry David Thoreau

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! ~ Henry David Thoreau

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It's circumstantial evidence, like finding a trout in the milk. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading? ~ Henry David Thoreau

I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy. ~ Henry David Thoreau

In my cheapest moments I am apt to think that it is n't my business to be "seeking the spirit," but as much its business to be seeking me. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the accomplishment of the past. We review the past with the common sense, but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In our sanest moments we find ourselves naturally expecting or prepared for far greater changes than any which we have experienced within the period of distinct memory, only to be paralleled by experiences which are forgotten. ~ Henry David Thoreau

One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time. ~ Henry David Thoreau

This world is but canvas to our imaginations. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it. Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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

The next day the Indian told me their name for this light,
artoosoq',
and on my inquiring concerning the will-o'-the-wisp, and the like phenomena, he said that his "folks" sometimes saw fires passing along at various heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise. I was prepared after this to hear of the most startling and unimagined phenomena, witnessed by "his folks"; they are abroad at all hours and seasons in scenes so unfrequented by white men. Nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which are still secrets to us. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Nature spontaneously keeps us well. Do not resist her! ~ Henry David Thoreau

Live free, child of the mist,- and with respect to knowledge we are allchildren of the mist. ~ Henry David Thoreau

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson. ~ Pico Iyer

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. ~ Henry David Thoreau