Henry David Thoreau Quotes (701 Quotes)

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.

I saw a delicate flower had grown up two feet high between the horses' feet and the wheel trach. An inch more to the right or left had sealed its fate, or an inch higher. Yet it lived and flourished, and never knew the danger it incurred. It did not borrow trouble, nor invite an evil fate by apprehending it.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts But so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

What I have been preparing to say is this, in wildness is the preservation of the world ... Life consists of wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued by man, its presence refreshes him.... When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. In short, all good things are wild and free.

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.

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.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love.

We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest. . .

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are.

Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.

I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which these things would be by me unavoidable.

So high as a tree aspires to grow, so high will it find an atmosphere suited to it.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

It is a great art to saunter.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

. He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton he who does not cannot be otherwise.

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

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the 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. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science.

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.

The words which express our faith and piety are not definite yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

Associate reverently, and as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.