H D Thoreau Quotes

#1. It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#2. Faith never makes a confession.

Henry David Thoreau

#3. As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.

Henry David Thoreau

#4. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Henry David Thoreau

#5. One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

Henry David Thoreau

#6. Have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. We have need to be as sturdy pioneers still as Miles Standish, or Church, or Lovewell. We are to follow on another trail, it is true, but one as convenient for ambushes. What if the Indians are exterminated, are not savages as grim prowling about the clearings today?

Henry David Thoreau

#8. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth.

Henry David Thoreau

#9. I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.

Henry David Thoreau

#10. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

Henry David Thoreau

#11. A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.

Henry David Thoreau

#12. I make myself rich by making my wants few.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

#14. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

Henry David Thoreau

#15. If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a spectulator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Henry David Thoreau

#16. The tragedy in a man's life is what dies inside of him while he lives.

Henry David Thoreau

#17. Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.

Henry David Thoreau

#18. Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.

Henry David Thoreau

#19. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today?

Henry David Thoreau

#20. It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

Henry David Thoreau

#21. A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau

#22. Truth, Goodness, Beauty - those celestial thrins,Continually are born; e'en now the Universe,With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles,Its joy confesses at their recent birth.

Henry David Thoreau

#23. You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Henry David Thoreau

#24. The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.

Henry David Thoreau

#25. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Henry David Thoreau

#26. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects.

Henry David Thoreau

#27. I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

Henry David Thoreau

#28. Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

Henry David Thoreau

#29. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?

Henry David Thoreau

#30. Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

#32. Having reached the term of his natural life; Mwould it not be truer to say, Having reached the term of his unnatural life?

Henry David Thoreau