Quotes About Reading Thoreau

#1. When you're reading Thoreau you look at Hollywood differently, let me tell ya!

Emile Hirsch

#2. And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#3. Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading.

Henry David Thoreau

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

Henry David Thoreau

#8. 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

#9. What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,
for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

Henry David Thoreau

#10. I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

Henry David Thoreau

#11. 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

#12. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Henry David Thoreau

#13. My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university;

Henry David Thoreau

#14. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Henry David Thoreau

#15. Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Henry David Thoreau

#16. Read the best books first, otherwise you'll find you do not have time.
- Henry David Thoreau

Leo Tolstoy

#17. 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

#18. He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.

Henry David Thoreau

#19. 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

#20. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading?

Henry David Thoreau

#21. The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau - but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.

Doris Lessing

#22. Do not read the newspapers.

Henry David Thoreau

#23. Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.

Henry David Thoreau

#24. The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau's Walden.

Edward Carpenter

#25. Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

Henry David Thoreau

#26. We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

Henry David Thoreau

#27. 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

#28. In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.

Henry David Thoreau

#29. The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.

Henry David Thoreau

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say.

Henry David Thoreau

#33. The Library is a wilderness of books.

Henry David Thoreau

#34. Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.

Henry David Thoreau

#35. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

Henry David Thoreau