Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor.
Faith never makes a confession.
How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.
There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.
Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.
To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.
'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.
Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
