Henry David Thoreau

Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.

As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.

The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature.

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

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.

To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

Be not merely good. Be good for something.

I pray that the life of this spring and summer may ever lie fair in my memory.

One must maintain a little bittle of summer, even in the middle of winter.

The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.

I have a deep sympathy with war; it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?