Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.
This, our respectable daily life, on which the man of common sense, the Englishman of the world, stands so squarely, and on which our institut...
Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not ev...
We should omit a main attraction in these books, if we said nothing of their humor. Of this indispensable pledge of sanity, without some leave...
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. Life
You may raise enough money to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business.
Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at lea...
We falsely attribute to men a determined character - putting together all their yesterdays - and averaging them - we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support - it is worse than a large family - he is the silent poor indeed.
We think that we can change our clothes only.
Your method of traveling, especially,—to live along the road, citizens of the world, without haste or petty plans,—I have often proposed t...
God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God's cof...
Nature is an admirable schoolmistress.
The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth.
The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.
I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.
A man's whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. It is its net result.
Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been consci...
It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.
A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christi...
Is it not singular that, while the religious world is gradually picking to pieces its old testaments, here are some coming slowly after, on th...
One farmer says to me, You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone ...
