Top 41 Henry David Thoreau Book Quotes
#1. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau
#2. George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose "Woodcraft," published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.
John McPhee
#3. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.
Henry David Thoreau
#6. For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
Henry David Thoreau
#7. A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.
Henry David Thoreau
#8. Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.
Henry David Thoreau
#9. Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.
Henry David Thoreau
#10. After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.
Henry David Thoreau
#11. A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for.
Henry David Thoreau
#12. If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?
Henry David Thoreau
#13. A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.
Henry David Thoreau
#14. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.
Henry David Thoreau
#15. What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!
Henry David Thoreau
#16. He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.
Henry David Thoreau
#17. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It
Henry David Thoreau
#18. It is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead,
equally alive. I think the best parts of Shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. I have found it so. And so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation.
Henry David Thoreau
#19. All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.
Henry David Thoreau
#20. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.
Henry David Thoreau
#21. The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely.
Henry David Thoreau
#22. In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading?
Henry David Thoreau
#24. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.
Henry David Thoreau
#25. Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.
Henry David Thoreau
#26. The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.
Henry David Thoreau
#27. Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
Henry David Thoreau
#29. Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.
Henry David Thoreau
#30. There are as many strata at different levels of life as there are leaves in a book. When on the higher levels we can remember the lower levels, but when on the lower we cannot remember the higher.
Henry David Thoreau
#31. In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.
Henry David Thoreau
#32. 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
#33. Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.
Henry David Thoreau
#34. There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
Henry David Thoreau
#36. It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.
Henry David Thoreau
#39. How novel and original must be each new mans view of the universe - for though the world is so old - and so many books have been written - each object appears wholly undescribed to our experience - each field of thought wholly unexplored - the whole world is an America - a New World.
Henry David Thoreau
#40. We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.
Henry David Thoreau
#41. We are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen, and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney-corner, willoften peep till they die, nevertheless; but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly.
Henry David Thoreau
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