Explore Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.

I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.

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.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.

The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment.

What is commonly called friendship is only a little more honor among rogues.

But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. Now he falls between two stools.

Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect.

What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.

The imagination never forgets; it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone.

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.

He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical.

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!

The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.