Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
When a dog runs at you, whistle for him
So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is ...
We do not live by justice, but by grace.
Franklin,—Washington,—they were left off without dying; they were merely missing one day.
While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.
Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.
You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten eart...
Life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting.... We have not got half-way to dawn yet.
The Eastern steamboat passed us with music and a cheer, as if they were going to a ball, when they might be going to—Davy's locker.
Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground?
As for Waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. Do not the flowers die every autumn? He...
Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, such cheer, they affor...
All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it ...
There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up...
We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
Rabelais, for instance, is intolerable; one chapter is better than a volume,—it may be sport to him, but it is death to us. A mere humorist,...
America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense th...
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?
The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, b...
We have got to know what both life and death are, before we can begin to live after our own fashion. Let us be learning our a-b- c's as soon a...
It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and...
Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie; and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it.
