As for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that. Let not your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. It will prove a failure.... It is a greater strain than any soul can long endure. When you get God to pulling one way, and the devil the other, each having his feet well braced,--to say nothing of the conscience sawing transversely,--almost any timber will give way.
Henry David ThoreauFriendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.
Henry David ThoreauDid ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them - that it was a vain endeavor?
Henry David ThoreauWhat a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!
Henry David ThoreauThe richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand.
Henry David ThoreauThe pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.
Henry David ThoreauFishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.
Henry David ThoreauThe finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Henry David ThoreauThe chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.
Henry David ThoreauIt is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.
Henry David ThoreauIn civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.
Henry David ThoreauI do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.
Henry David ThoreauBut what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. Now he falls between two stools.
Henry David ThoreauFrom my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.
Henry David ThoreauWhy should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions.
Henry David ThoreauThe village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.
Henry David ThoreauIf words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention
Henry David ThoreauMen and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.
Henry David ThoreauEvery child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it...At last we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.
Henry David ThoreauIt [is of] some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life.
Henry David ThoreauWe are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
Henry David ThoreauFriendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.
Henry David ThoreauA familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earnedin the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.
Henry David ThoreauWhen you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,--none of the servants.
Henry David ThoreauWe are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.
Henry David ThoreauThe intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.
Henry David ThoreauIt is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism.
Henry David ThoreauOne man lies in his words, and gets a bad reputation; another in his manners, and enjoys a good one.
Henry David ThoreauThe gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, would be good for me, too.
Henry David Thoreau