Quotes About Thoreau

#1. As Edward Glaeser put it, 'Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.

Matt Ridley

#2. There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.

David Whyte

#3. Zarathustra received his revelations from the archangels at age thirty, when he began his prophetic mission; Siddhartha's great renunciation of his princely life took place in his thirtieth year. Thoreau at age thirty finished his self-imposed isolation at Walden Pond.

Kevin Dann

#4. It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.

Michael Pollan

#5. 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

#6. Thoreau, At death, our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us, and are found out, or depart farther from us, and are forgotten.

Neil Peart

#7. Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? (Thoreau).

Maggie Nelson

#8. 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

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

Edward Carpenter

#10. I wouldn't know where to start."
"He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to."
"Thoreau?"
"Harry Emerson Fosdick ...

Kami Garcia

#11. There is a kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith's best work, an understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with a commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda.

Joseph Bruchac

#12. They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

Rebecca Solnit

#13. Civil disobedience has almost always been about expression. Generally, it's nonviolent, as defined by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.

Marvin Ammori

#14. You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today.

Nelson Algren

#15. Thoreau and Huxley calmly state what I have spent years trying to articulate, and never found the words for doing so. To read the words of these great men is to read the highest expression of my very self which is inexpressible due to the shortcomings of my particular nature.

Chris Matakas

#16. Thoreau wrote, "Simplify! Simplify!" And, indeed, simplification is one mark of real genius.

Dan Ariely

#17. Live deep instead of fast. I think this is what Thoreau meant.

Henry Seidel Canby

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

F Scott Fitzgerald

#19. Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway.

Alfred Kazin

#20. It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel.

Loudon Wainwright III

#21. I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here ... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness ... give me truth.

Jon Krakauer

#22. As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

Pico Iyer

#23. Thoreau said: "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor." That is not only an encouraging statement, it is also an empowering one. It means you can accomplish a lot by applying your brainpower and then moving forward with it.

Donald Trump

#24. Nothing could be worse, Thoreau wrote, than to come to the end of life and "discover that I had not lived.

Dale Salwak

#25. Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...

Michael Finkel

#26. Give me a bottle of hard cider, a bowl of Peterson Irish Oak in my Neerup pipe, and please, above all, give my Henry David Thoreau's Wild Apples. Do that and you will see a man contented.

Nicholas Trandahl

#27. I try to be honorable. I know that's embarrassing to hear. It's embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms.

Robert B. Parker

#28. Thoreau was an idiot.

Bill Bryson

#29. I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.

Robert Macfarlane

#30. It mattered little to anyone outside the Transcendental coterie that Bronson Alcott had finally written something publishable - his "Orphic Sayings" - for the opening issue; or that an unemployed schoolteacher named Henry David Thoreau had his first piece published in its pages.

Megan Marshall

#31. For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root - Thoreau

Stephen Covey

#32. Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck. In other words, he writes out of a concern for justice, love, honesty, and hope.

Edward Abbey

#33. I've been living out loud the Henry David Thoreau saying: "What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals." The quest of the Cuba

Diana Nyad

#34. [Thoreau] is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man.

W. Somerset Maugham

#35. Parents often give middle names just so that later, when they're yelling at the kid, they can drag it out. Henry David Thoreau, you come in here this instant!

Paul Reiser

#36. I grew up in Belle Harbor, which is in New York City, but it has the most powerful sense of nature and seasons. It wasn't even the beach and the water. I just dreamt about everything that had to do with nature. I read about Thoreau.

Joel Sternfeld

#37. I don't want to turn 50 and say, 'Gosh, I wish I'd lived in that part of the world for a time. I wish I'd read that book by Faulkner.' I want time to delve back into Thoreau and Kafka.

Charlie Trotter

#38. It's not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?" - Henry David Thoreau

Brian P. Moran

#39. This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say - 'One world at a time'?

John Updike

#40. Whenever I read anything by Henry David Thoreau I honestly feel as though he's with me. No. More like I am with him.

Nicholas Trandahl

#41. Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#42. Thoreau said: "It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is what are you so busy about?

Anonymous

#43. Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself

Pearl S. Buck

#44. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded quite simply: "I did not know we had ever quarreled.

MobileReference

#45. 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

#46. Rather than earn money, it was Thoreau's idea to reduce his wants so that he would not need to buy anything. As he went around preaching this ingenious idea, the shopkeepers of Concord hoped he would drop dead.

Richard Armour

#47. Thoreau loved ants. He'd meet one in the morning and spend the whole day talking to him.

Charles Simic

#48. We need the tonic of wilderness. - Henry David Thoreau

Richard Louv

#49. As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

Neil Postman

#50. As Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, "It matters not where or how far you travel - the farther commonly the worse - but how much alive you are." Two

Pico Iyer

#51. I'll go live in the woods," said Malone.
"You'll be lonely," said Sutherland. "Even Thoreau went to town in the afternoon to gossip.

Andrew Holleran

#52. We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

Pico Iyer

#53. Are you for real? You can't use another friend? We can't be 'just friends'? - Liz. Hell no - Thoreau.

Whitney G.

#54. When [Ralph Waldo] Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, 'What are you doing in there?' it was reported that Thoreau replied, 'What are you doing out there?'

Howard Zinn

#55. Henry David Thoreau is my favorite writer of all time, my literary god king, and his essay Wild Apples is my favorite thing to read.

Nicholas Trandahl

#56. I like the story about Henry David Thoreau, who, when he was on his death bed, his family sent for a minister. The minister said, 'Henry, have you made your peace with God?' Thoreau said, 'I didn't know we'd quarreled.'

Stewart Udall

#57. But what I was going to say was, I just figured I'm going to go boldly in the direction of my dreams, say it as Thoreau would say, and just see where it takes me.

Demetri Martin

#58. I think the idea of holing up and hunkering down against the larger forces of the world has not lost its allure since Thoreau's time. If anything that instinct, or impulse, continues to reside in almost all of us, sometimes activated or bestirred and other times dormant but always present.

Rick Bass

#59. If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even ... he forthwith sets about reforming - the world."3

Eric Hoffer

#60. This whole town is like a big Fuck You to Thoreau.

Donna Tartt

#61. Concord is a classic land. The names of Emerson and Thoreau and Channing and Hawthorne are associated with the fields and forests and lakes and rivers of this township.

Amos Bronson Alcott

#62. Half the world wants to be like Thoreau worrying about the noise of traffic on the way up to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half.

Franz Kline

#63. In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson said, 'Henry, what are you doing in there?' Thoreau quietly replied, 'Ralph, what are you doing out there?'

Henry David Thoreau

#64. Thoreau once said if you see a man approach you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life; it is hard to restrain the impulse in talking with social engineers.

William H. Whyte

#65. Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Leon Edel

#66. I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few ... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

Joyce Carol Oates

#67. Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Leo Tolstoy

#69. One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.

Wendell Berry

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

Emile Hirsch

#71. Ultimately, I found my instincts mirrored in a line from Thoreau: 'My needle ... always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more exhausted and richer on that side.

Phillip Connors

#72. I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.

Robert Hass

#73. Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time.

Hayden Carruth

#74. Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats.

Chris Matakas

#75. Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

Henry David Thoreau

#76. The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

Allen Ginsberg

#77. Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him.

Jonathan Kozol

#78. Henry David Thoreau was an oddball job quitter and ne'er-do-well who evolved into the bearded sage of literature, natural history, and civil liberties.

Michael Sims

#79. [on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#80. 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

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

#83. 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

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

Henry David Thoreau

#86. 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

#87. 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

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

Henry David Thoreau

#89. 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

#90. 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

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

Henry David Thoreau

#92. 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

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

Henry David Thoreau

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

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

Henry David Thoreau

#100. 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