It is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward. Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide.
Henry David ThoreauThat government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Henry David ThoreauThat virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.
Henry David ThoreauPhilanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.
Henry David ThoreauBy avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Henry David ThoreauWe are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.
Henry David ThoreauMost men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.
Henry David ThoreauWe should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.
Henry David ThoreauMen talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.
Henry David ThoreauNowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.
Henry David ThoreauTo be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.
Henry David ThoreauYou can hardly convince a man of error in a life-time, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grand-children may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.
Henry David ThoreauBiography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?
Henry David ThoreauThe thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July.
Henry David ThoreauWe love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say; the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. They stand many deep.
Henry David ThoreauEven the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
Henry David ThoreauThe greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.
Henry David ThoreauI would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.
Henry David ThoreauIf you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Henry David ThoreauOne may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.
Henry David ThoreauWe should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.
Henry David ThoreauWe seem to have forgotten that the expression "a liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man.
Henry David ThoreauIs not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the black Nile that concerns us.
Henry David ThoreauOur houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
Henry David ThoreauThe true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids.
Henry David ThoreauWhen we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.
Henry David ThoreauIn what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
Henry David ThoreauLet Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.
Henry David ThoreauHaving reached the term of his natural life"; Mwould it not be truer to say, Having reached the term of his unnatural life?
Henry David ThoreauFollow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.
Henry David ThoreauThe only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success,--the ability to do some slight thing better. We make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part,--at least apparently,--but sometimes these are cinnamon and spices, you know.
Henry David ThoreauTruth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.
Henry David Thoreau