Henry David Thoreau Quotes - Page 3

When I hear music I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.
Henry David Thoreau
Simplicity simplicity simplicity. I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.
Henry David Thoreau
Whate'er we leave to God God does and blesses us.
Henry David Thoreau
The frontiers are not east or west north or south but wherever a man fronts a fact.
Henry David Thoreau
When a dog runs at you whistle for him.
Henry David Thoreau
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
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 far away.
Henry David Thoreau
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
Henry David Thoreau
It is never too late to give up your prejudices
Henry David Thoreau
A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.
Henry David Thoreau
Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.
Henry David Thoreau
Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.
Henry David Thoreau
If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know how much truth is stronger than errors, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
Henry David Thoreau
My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.
Henry David Thoreau
Philanthropy is. . . greatly overrated. A pain in the gut is not sympathy for the underprivileged, but the result of eating a green apple; the philanthropist gives to ease his own pain.
Henry David Thoreau
The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.
Henry David Thoreau
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Henry David Thoreau
What is once well done is done forever.
Henry David Thoreau
As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
Henry David Thoreau
If a man does not keep pace with hiscompanions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Lethim step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree oran oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?
Henry David Thoreau
Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.
Henry David Thoreau
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.
Henry David Thoreau
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.
Henry David Thoreau
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined
Henry David Thoreau
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.
Henry David Thoreau
A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
Henry David Thoreau
I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.
Henry David Thoreau
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Henry David Thoreau
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.
Henry David Thoreau
There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, and not a grain more. ... A man sees only what concerns him.
Henry David Thoreau
If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Henry David Thoreau
‎I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.
Henry David Thoreau
Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.
Henry David Thoreau
If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and 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
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
Henry David Thoreau
It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.
Henry David Thoreau
I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intellegent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as his only AVAILABLE one, thus proving that he is himself AVAILABLE for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.
Henry David Thoreau
No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.
Henry David Thoreau
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
Henry David Thoreau
There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
Henry David Thoreau
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection.
Henry David Thoreau
The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.
Henry David Thoreau
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau
Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.
Henry David Thoreau
I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.
Henry David Thoreau
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.
Henry David Thoreau
Life in us is like the water in a river.
Henry David Thoreau
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
Henry David Thoreau
Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death
Henry David Thoreau
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
Henry David Thoreau
Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.
Henry David Thoreau
We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Henry David Thoreau
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
Henry David Thoreau
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Henry David Thoreau
Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
Henry David Thoreau
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed
Henry David Thoreau