The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.
Henry David ThoreauThe authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
Henry David ThoreauI say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Henry David ThoreauThe sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.
Henry David ThoreauWhat are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.
Henry David ThoreauThe philosopher's conception of things will, above all, be truer than other men's, and his philosophy will subordinate all the circumstances of life. To live like a philosopher is to live, not foolishly, like other men, but wisely and according to universal laws.
Henry David ThoreauIf one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined...
Henry David ThoreauI am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.
Henry David ThoreauIt would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
Henry David ThoreauWhat a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age.
Henry David ThoreauWe need the tonic of the wilderness, to wade sometimes in the marsh where the bitten 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, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.
Henry David ThoreauThere are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
Henry David ThoreauWith all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?
Henry David ThoreauSome circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Henry David ThoreauAs for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some.
Henry David ThoreauFriendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!
Henry David ThoreauI heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
Henry David ThoreauWe seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.
Henry David ThoreauThe chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.
Henry David ThoreauThe condition-of-England question is a practical one. The condition of England demands a hero, not a poet.
Henry David ThoreauIn 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 and trivial.
Henry David ThoreauThe life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.
Henry David ThoreauThe deeds of love are less questionable than any action of an individual can be, for, it being founded on the rarest mutual respect, the parties incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life, and the act in which they are associated must be pure and noble indeed, for innocence and purity can have no equal. In this relation we deal with one whom we respect more religiously even than we respect our better selves, and we shall necessarily conduct as in the presence of God. What presence can be more awful to the lover than the presence of his beloved?
Henry David ThoreauI saw deep in the eyes of the animals the human soul look out upon me. I saw where it was born deep down under feathers and fur, or condemned for a while to roam four-footed among the brambles,I caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner and swore that I would be faithful.
Henry David ThoreauIt's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.
Henry David ThoreauA town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.
Henry David ThoreauWe could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men's necessities, while elsewhereshe was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim's shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.
Henry David ThoreauWhen I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street,--not being inclined to change my dress,--to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.
Henry David ThoreauThere can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
Henry David ThoreauIt would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day.
Henry David ThoreauNature 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 ThoreauI sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again.
Henry David ThoreauA thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
Henry David ThoreauEvents, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Henry David ThoreauTo enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.
Henry David ThoreauWhat is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.
Henry David Thoreau