How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
Henry David ThoreauAt present the globe goes with a shattered constitution in its orbit.... No doubt the simple powers of nature, properly directed by man, would make it healthy and a paradise; as the laws of man's own constitution but wait to be obeyed, to restore him to health and happiness.
Henry David ThoreauCertainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.
Henry David ThoreauIf you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.
Henry David ThoreauThe sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
Henry David ThoreauMost of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Henry David ThoreauIf men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?
Henry David ThoreauI love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me continually.
Henry David ThoreauIf a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on thevery spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there; but the places that have known him, they are lost,--how much anxiety and danger would vanish.
Henry David ThoreauThe Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, andagain, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him.
Henry David ThoreauI am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.
Henry David ThoreauOur thoughts are epochs in our lives; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blow while we are here.
Henry David ThoreauIt is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
Henry David ThoreauIf the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.
Henry David ThoreauWhat wisdom, what warning can prevail against gladness? There is no law so strong that a little gladness may not transgress.
Henry David ThoreauI am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath.
Henry David ThoreauThe sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.
Henry David ThoreauThus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
Henry David ThoreauThe youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.
Henry David ThoreauMy days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.
Henry David ThoreauFront yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Henry David ThoreauThe prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense; but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.
Henry David ThoreauThe way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails - aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.
Henry David ThoreauMy desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
Henry David ThoreauIf a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him . . he will be surrounded by grandeur.
Henry David ThoreauDoubtless, we are as slow to conceive of Paradise as of Heaven, of a perfect natural as of a perfect spiritual world. We see how past ages have loitered and erred. "Is perhaps our generation free from irrationality and error? Have we perhaps reached now the summit of human wisdom, and need no more to look out for mental or physical improvement?" Undoubtedly, we are never so visionary as to be prepared for what the next hour may bring forth.
Henry David ThoreauI expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which, a man will get his coat as honestly and as perfectly fitting as a tree itsbark. Now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i.e., of the devil, and to some extent react on us and poison us, like that shirt which Hercules put on.
Henry David ThoreauI have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is...
Henry David ThoreauWe need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
Henry David ThoreauPoetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.
Henry David Thoreau