A man's social and spiritual discipline must answer to his corporeal. He must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he wouldlie on a hard bed. He must drink cold water for his only beverage. So he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. He must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends.
Henry David ThoreauYet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary.
Henry David ThoreauI noticed, as I had done before, that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight, and that they began again in the morning. Nature is thus merciful. But apparently they need rest as well as we.
Henry David ThoreauProbably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but findher our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.
Henry David ThoreauSome, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler.
Henry David ThoreauI do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.
Henry David ThoreauVerily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.
Henry David ThoreauWhen the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.
Henry David ThoreauThere is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony.
Henry David ThoreauWhat a battle a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array throughthe always hostile country! How many enemies there are to sane thinking! Every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles.
Henry David ThoreauDo not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
Henry David ThoreauIt is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so.
Henry David ThoreauFishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.
Henry David ThoreauThe true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.
Henry David ThoreauBe wary of technology; it is often merely an improved means to an unimproved end.
Henry David ThoreauGenerally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.
Henry David ThoreauThe boatmen appeared to lead an easy and contented life, and we thought that we should prefer their employment ourselves to many professions which are much more sought after. They suggested how few circumstances are necessary to the well-being and serenity of man, how indifferent all employments are, and that any may seem noble and poetic to the eyes of men, if pursued with sufficient buoyancy and freedom.
Henry David ThoreauIf I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.
Henry David ThoreauOur inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Henry David ThoreauMust the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
Henry David ThoreauMy desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.
Henry David ThoreauThere is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.
Henry David ThoreauWhen I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.
Henry David ThoreauWho knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concretic layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society...may unexpectedly come forth...to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!...Such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn...Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Henry David ThoreauThere are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.
Henry David ThoreauThe eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one.
Henry David ThoreauMost men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
Henry David ThoreauWhile almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Naturemen appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kosmos, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.
Henry David ThoreauGood religious men, with the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in their pockets.
Henry David ThoreauPerchance the time will come when we shall not be content to go back and forth upon a raft to some huge Homeric or Shakespearean Indiaman that lies upon the reef, but build a bark out of that wreck and others that are buried in the sands of this desolate island, and such new timber as may be required, in which to sail away to whole new worlds of light and life, where our friends are.
Henry David ThoreauThe monster is never just there where we think he is. What is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth.
Henry David ThoreauI did not go to Boston, for with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home.
Henry David ThoreauWe cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.
Henry David ThoreauOnly nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.
Henry David Thoreau