Top 86 Thoreau Love Quotes
#1. I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.
Henry David Thoreau
#2. All that man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love-to sing, and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.
Henry David Thoreau
#3. Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure, nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest and with freedom.
Henry David Thoreau
#5. As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
#6. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Henry David Thoreau
#7. A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.
Henry David Thoreau
#8. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery.
Henry David Thoreau
#9. I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.
Henry David Thoreau
#10. A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no otherlaw nor kindness.
Henry David Thoreau
#11. He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.
Henry David Thoreau
#15. It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.
Henry David Thoreau
#16. There must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a winter morning.
Henry David Thoreau
#17. I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
#18. For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; ... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.
Henry David Thoreau
#19. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep.
Henry David Thoreau
#20. The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love.
Henry David Thoreau
#22. What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse.
Henry David Thoreau
#25. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
Henry David Thoreau
#26. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.
Henry David Thoreau
#27. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Henry David Thoreau
#30. What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love.
Henry David Thoreau
#31. Love is no individual's experience; and though we are imperfect mediums, it does not partake of our imperfection; though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal ...
Henry David Thoreau
#32. In love and friendship the imagination is as much exercised as the heart; and if either is outraged the other will be estranged. It is commonly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart,
it is so much the more sensitive.
Henry David Thoreau
#34. It has come to this, that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake. You must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand-heap. You must have so good an appetite as this, else you will live in vain
Henry David Thoreau
#36. Good religious men, with the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in their pockets.
Henry David Thoreau
#38. There must be the ... generating force of Love behind every effort destined to be successful.
Henry David Thoreau
#39. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.
Henry David Thoreau
#40. I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.
Henry David Thoreau
#42. I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground.
Henry David Thoreau
#44. Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.
Henry David Thoreau
#46. If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow.
Henry David Thoreau
#47. 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
#48. I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here ... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness ... give me truth.
Jon Krakauer
#49. It often happens that a man develops a deeper love and friendship with his pet cat or dog than he does with most of the other humans in his life.
Henry David Thoreau
#50. Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,
if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
#52. Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged.
Henry David Thoreau
#53. We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say; the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. They stand many deep.
Henry David Thoreau
#54. We must love our friend so much that she shall be associated with our purest and holiest thoughts alone.
Henry David Thoreau
#55. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.
Henry David Thoreau
#56. Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love.
Henry David Thoreau
#58. Kindness to children, love for children, goodness to children
these are the only investments that never fail.
Henry David Thoreau
#60. A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.
Henry David Thoreau
#61. All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all.
Henry David Thoreau
#62. We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love.
Henry David Thoreau
#63. It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. ... We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.
Henry David Thoreau
#65. I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
#66. You have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these American days ... Farmers' sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light.
Henry David Thoreau
#68. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
Henry David Thoreau
#71. I value and trust those w^ho love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance.
Henry David Thoreau
#72. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.
Henry David Thoreau
#73. 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
#74. I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.
Henry David Thoreau
#75. I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me continually.
Henry David Thoreau
#76. I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.
Henry David Thoreau
#77. 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
#78. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
Henry David Thoreau
#79. The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard
Henry David Thoreau
#81. One may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate ... Love must be as much a light as a flame.
Henry David Thoreau
#84. The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like
the azure ether beyond.
Henry David Thoreau
#85. For if the truth were known, Love cannot speak, But only thinks and does; Though surely out 'twill leak Without the help of Greek, Or any tongue.
Henry David Thoreau
#86. The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.
Henry David Thoreau
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