Henry David Thoreau Quotes (701 Quotes)

Things do not change, we do.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats.

The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

No doubt another may also think for me but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

I hear many condemn these men Founding Fathers because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution such call I good books.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder.

The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails ... beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments Why should I feel lonely Is not our planet in the Milky Way This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made Or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are NOT good.

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance it depends on how you are yarded.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

I came into this world, not cheifly to make this a good place to live in, but live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something and because he can not do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

You think that I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone, I never found the companionable as solitude.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

I was never unusually squeamish I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it was necessary

Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.

In the long run, men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.