Explore Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention

In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

But why should not the New Englander try new adventures - not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards - and raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men.

. . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.

The man of genius knows what he is aiming at; nobody else knows. And he alone knows when something comes between him and his object. In the course of generations, however, men will excuse you for not doing as they do, if you will bring enough to pass in your own way.

When I hear a grown man or woman say, "Once I had faith in men, now I have not," I am inclined to ask, "Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?"

It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.

When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?

A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.

We are ever dying to one world and being born into another.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.

The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing one very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them,-though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances,-that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed.