Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings.

We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.

Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport.

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.

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value;they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.

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

The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter

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

It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellowmen to have an interest in your enterprise.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!

By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.

But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.

If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow.

What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.

I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

Time cannot bend the line which God has writ.

I think of no news to tell you. It is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. The hens steal their nests, and I steal theireggs still, as formerly. This is what I do with the hands. Ah, labor,--it is a divine institution, and conversation with many men and hens.

Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.

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.

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves, that there may be grounds enough for friendship.

Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.

We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once moreonly the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,--those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.

The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard.

Be not merely good. Be good for something.

All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.

There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor.

To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.

There was something refreshingly and wildly musical to my ears in the very name of the white man's canoe, reminding me of Charlevoix and Canadian Voyageurs. The batteau is a sort of mongrel between the canoe and the boat, a fur-trader's boat.

Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul;but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the traveler, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan or Bagdat. Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.

Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.

The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and systematic application of known laws to nature, causes the unknown to reveal themselves. Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.

Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.