Henry David Thoreau quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Henry David Thoreau on Wise Famous Quotes.

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

The virtue which we appreciate, we to some extent appropriate.

Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.

With what infinite & unwearied expectation and proclamations the cocks usher in every dawn, as if there had never been one before.

The Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots.

A man's wealth is measured by what he doesn't need.

One man lies in his words, and gets a bad reputation; another in his manners, and enjoys a good one.

A hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's.

Remember that you need not eat unless you are hungry.

If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and extravagance of genius. She has her luxurious and florid style as well as art.

Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.

All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all.

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.

In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.

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.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul where is the substance?

The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.

None can lead this life who are not almost amphibious.

But they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions are not therefore unconcerned about their actions.

I am a majority of one.

For the most part, the best man's spirit makes a fearful sprite to haunt his grave.

The biggest happiness is when at the end of the year you feel better than at the beginning

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.

The most alive is the wildest.

How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

Not till we are completely lost or turned around ... do we begin to find ourselves.

We live but a fraction of our lives.

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?

The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end?

To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.

Nature is full of genius, full of divinity.

Under a goverment which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison

The newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses.

The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

The way you spend Christmas is far more important than how much.

When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?

It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

I have myself to respect, but to myself I am not amiable; but my friend is my amiableness personified.

I will not through humility become the devil's attorney

You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?

The gifts of Heaven are never quite gratuitous.

The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect.

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

The fact is, mental philosophy is very like Poverty, which, you know, begins at home; and indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.

You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.

Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.

The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression.

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

I am of the nature of Stone. It takes the summer's sun to warm it.

to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to

With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

You never gain something but that you lose something.

I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.

What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!

Few, if any, creatures are equally active all night.

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

As in many countries precious metals belong to the crown, so here more precious natural objects of rare beauty should belong to the public.

It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery.

There are many fine things we cannot say if we have to shout.

I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.

Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!

Music is the crystallization of sound.

Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.

I say, break the law.

I do not believe there are eight hundred human beings on the globe.

Man is but the place where I stand ...

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy evil, that they may no longer have have it to regret.

This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal.