Quotes About Writing Thoreau

#1. 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

#2. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

#3. Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths; of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray?

Henry David Thoreau

#4. Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.

Henry David Thoreau

#5. What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?

Henry David Thoreau

#6. Write while the heat is in you.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

Henry David Thoreau

#8. As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

Henry David Thoreau

#9. To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense,it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it.

Henry David Thoreau

#10. Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one's style, both of speaking and writing.

Henry David Thoreau

#11. A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

Henry David Thoreau

#12. Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

Henry David Thoreau

#13. When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

#14. The poet writes the history of his own body.

Henry David Thoreau

#15. Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed.

Henry David Thoreau

#16. All men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. Theyprefer to be misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance.

Henry David Thoreau

#17. The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.

Henry David Thoreau

#18. Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

Henry David Thoreau

#19. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
[Letter to Harrison Blake; November 16, 1857]

Henry David Thoreau

#20. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

Henry David Thoreau

#21. Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Henry David Thoreau

#22. 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

#23. We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.

Henry David Thoreau

#24. 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

#25. The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

Henry David Thoreau

#26. We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still

Henry David Thoreau

#27. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.

Henry David Thoreau

#28. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.

Henry David Thoreau

#29. There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.

Henry David Thoreau

#30. A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Henry David Thoreau