|
|
||
|
||
Browse Quotes by Topic:
Featured Authors:
|
Henry David Thoreau quotes (129) I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes and not rather a new wearer of clothes. Henry David Thoreau Category: Business It is a great art to saunter. Henry David Thoreau Category: Walk We 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 Thoreau Category: Life If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year that would not be a violent and bloody measure as it would be to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. Henry David Thoreau Category: Tax A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone. Henry David Thoreau Category: Rich Let justice be done though the heavens fall. Henry David Thoreau Category: Justice The man of genius knows what he is aiming at; nobody else knows. And he alone knows when something comes between him and his object. In the course of generations however men will excuse you for not doing as they do if you will bring enough to pass in your own way. Henry David Thoreau Category: Desire We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described. Henry David Thoreau Category: Influence Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air drink the drink taste the fruit and resign yourself to the influences of each. Henry David Thoreau Category: Seasons Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt I should not believe. Henry David Thoreau Category: Doubt It is as hard to see oneself as to look backwards without turning around. Henry David Thoreau Category: See Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. Henry David Thoreau Category: Invention One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. Henry David Thoreau Category: Spring It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. Henry David Thoreau Category: Wisdom Our life is frittered away with detail.... Simplify simplify. Henry David Thoreau Category: Details Men will lie on their backs talking about the the fall of man and never make an effort to get up. Henry David Thoreau Category: Fall I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. Henry David Thoreau Category: Ability I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach ... and not when I came to die discover that I had not lived.... Henry David Thoreau Category: Death Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new. Henry David Thoreau Category: Fashion Nature abhors a vacuum and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled. Henry David Thoreau Category: Nature Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. Henry David Thoreau Category: Humanitarian There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect. Henry David Thoreau Category: Suspicion What men call social virtues good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm. Henry David Thoreau Category: Companion Be not simply good; be good for something. Henry David Thoreau Category: Virtue Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it. Henry David Thoreau Category: Conformity Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. Henry David Thoreau Category: Book Every man is the builder of a temple called his body to the god he worships after a style purely his own nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Henry David Thoreau Category: Body If misery loves company misery has company enough. Henry David Thoreau Category: Company The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals. Henry David Thoreau Category: Universe A man sits as many risks as he runs. Henry David Thoreau Category: Risk Water is the only drink for a wise man. Henry David Thoreau Category: Alcohol Those whom we can love we can hate; to others we are indifferent. Henry David Thoreau Category: Children But why should not the New Englander try new adventures not lay so much stress on his grain his potato and grass crop and his orchards and raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men. Henry David Thoreau Category: Adventure If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society as most appear to do Im sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. Henry David Thoreau Category: Labor Live your life do your work then take your hat. Henry David Thoreau Category: Live Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake. Henry David Thoreau Category: Dream Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around. Henry David Thoreau Category: World Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears however measured or faraway. Henry David Thoreau Category: If How can they expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed time of character. Henry David Thoreau Category: Character The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau Category: Man We are constantly invited to be who we are. Henry David Thoreau Category: Vigilant It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Henry David Thoreau Category: Apparel My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground as chestnuts etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens. Henry David Thoreau Category: Discovery There is no remedy for love but to love more. Henry David Thoreau Category: Heaven Not that the story need be long but it will take a long while to make it short. Henry David Thoreau Category: Breeding One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve. Henry David Thoreau Category: Flower The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready and it may be a long time before they get off. Henry David Thoreau Category: Alone Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse. Henry David Thoreau Category: Work In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity in founding a family or a state or acquiring fame even we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal and need fear no change nor accident. Henry David Thoreau Category: Truth All voting is a sort of gaming like checkers or backgammon with a slight moral tinge to it a playing with right and wrong. Henry David Thoreau Category: Vote Men profess to be lovers of music but for the most part they give no evidence of it in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted. Henry David Thoreau Category: Bigotry Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect wonders. Henry David Thoreau Category: Faith We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing. Henry David Thoreau Category: Travel Great God I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye. Henry David Thoreau Category: God Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Henry David Thoreau Category: Charity There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. Henry David Thoreau Category: Corrupt What is the use of a house if you havent got a tolerable planet to put it on? Henry David Thoreau Category: House Rather than love than money than fame give me truth. Henry David Thoreau Category: Action How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Henry David Thoreau Category: Vain Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one. Henry David Thoreau Category: Majority But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. Henry David Thoreau Category: Machinery If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs is more elastic more starry more immortal that is your success. All nature is your congratulation and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. Henry David Thoreau Category: Success It is usually the imagination that is wounded first rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive. Henry David Thoreau Category: Illusions Even the best things are not equal to their fame. Henry David Thoreau Category: False It takes two to speak the truth one to speak and the other to hear. Henry David Thoreau Category: Listen Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid. Henry David Thoreau Category: Thief Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it gets out of its way. Henry David Thoreau Category: Government How novel and original must be each new mans view of the universe for though the world is so old & so many books have been written each object appears wholly undescribed to our experience each field of thought wholly unexplored The whole world is an America a New World. Henry David Thoreau Category: New To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts not even to found a school but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity independence magnanimity and trust. Henry David Thoreau Category: Philosophy There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. Henry David Thoreau Category: Dull Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile and then given his body to the dogs. Henry David Thoreau Category: Nation Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. Henry David Thoreau Category: Earth Wherever a man goes men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions and if they can constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. Henry David Thoreau Category: Indispensable The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it. Henry David Thoreau Category: Music Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Henry David Thoreau Category: Fear Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice we may be sure was thought twice. Henry David Thoreau Category: Reactionaries I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Henry David Thoreau Category: Self The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse. Henry David Thoreau Category: Poetry I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance and obsequious attendance but and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. Henry David Thoreau Category: Food Under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison. Henry David Thoreau Category: Civil All good things are wild and free. Henry David Thoreau Category: Good Time is but the stream I go afishin' in. I drink at it but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains. Henry David Thoreau Category: Fish How earthy old people become mouldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets. Henry David Thoreau Category: Old I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude two for friendship three for society. Henry David Thoreau Category: Society We are double-edged blades and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. Henry David Thoreau Category: Vice Its never to late to give up your prejudices. Henry David Thoreau Category: Prejudice The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest. Henry David Thoreau Category: Masses The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward. Henry David Thoreau Category: Money What is called genius is the abundance of life and health. Henry David Thoreau Category: Unsorted It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Henry David Thoreau Category: Cat Most 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 Thoreau Category: Wages I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines. Henry David Thoreau Category: Tree What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party. Henry David Thoreau Category: War To know that we know what we know And that we do not know what we do not know that is true knowledge. Henry David Thoreau Category: Happiness To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun the day is a perpetual morning. Henry David Thoreau Category: Morning The Youth gets together the materials to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or temple on earth but alas at length the middle aged man concludes to build a wood shed with the materials. Henry David Thoreau Category: Age It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. Henry David Thoreau Category: Learn I have a great deal of company in the house especially in the morning when nobody calls. Henry David Thoreau Category: Solitude All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every second. Henry David Thoreau Category: Change The man who is dissatisfied with himself what can he do? Henry David Thoreau Category: Hero How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Henry David Thoreau Category: Education Tis healthy to be sick sometimes. Henry David Thoreau Category: Health In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore though you should fail immediately you had better aim at something high. Henry David Thoreau Category: Aim In human intercourse the tragedy begins not when there is a misunderstanding about words but when silence is not understood. Henry David Thoreau Category: Sick There is more religion in mens science than there is science in their religion. Henry David Thoreau Category: Religion The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it. Henry David Thoreau Category: Property Most 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 Thoreau Category: Luxury I have lived some thirty years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. Henry David Thoreau Category: Advice If you would convince a man that he does wrong do right. Men will believe what they see. Henry David Thoreau Category: Convince Poverty it is life near the bone where it is sweetest. Henry David Thoreau Category: Potential Wealth is the ability to fully experience life. Henry David Thoreau Category: Wealth That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. Henry David Thoreau Category: Pleasure We cannot kill time without injuring eternity. Henry David Thoreau Category: Eternity Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced. Henry David Thoreau Category: Experience To a philosopher all news as it is called is gossip and they who edit it and read it are old women over their tea. Henry David Thoreau Category: Gossip The law will never make men free it is men that have to make the law free. Henry David Thoreau Category: Law We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the accomplishment of the past. We review the past with the common sense but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In our sanest moments we find ourselves naturally expecting or prepared for far greater changes than any which we have experienced within the period of distinct memory only to be paralleled by experiences which are forgotten. Henry David Thoreau Category: Future Some circumstantial evidence is very strong as when you find a trout in the milk. Henry David Thoreau Category: Proof The bluebird carries the sky on his back. Henry David Thoreau Category: Bird Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science. Henry David Thoreau Category: Superstition Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. Henry David Thoreau Category: Day I put a piece of paper under my pillow and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark. Henry David Thoreau Category: Writing 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. Henry David Thoreau Category: Trust The perception of beauty is a moral test. Henry David Thoreau Category: Beauty To inherit property is not to be born it is to be still-born rather. Henry David Thoreau Category: Inheritance True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance. Henry David Thoreau Category: Friendship Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. Henry David Thoreau Category: Clothes In wildness is the preservation of the world. Henry David Thoreau Category: Environment The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run. Henry David Thoreau Category: Cost |
|