Explore Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

We have built for this world a family mansion, and the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.

I was daily intoxicated, yet no man could call me intemperate.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.

The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is, in this sense, a hospital.

What the banker sighs for, the meanest clown may have-leisure and a quiet mind.

The world laughs in flowers.

They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy evil, that they may no longer have have it to regret.

He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past

Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.

Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.

That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline.

There is only one path to Heaven. On Earth, we call it Love.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

Whatever we leave to God, God does and blesses us.

It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellowmen to have an interest in your enterprise.

Trees indeed have hearts.

I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way .

Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!

When I consider that the noble animals have been exterminated here - the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc, etc - I cannot but feel as I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.

The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.