Quotes by Thoreau, Henry David

"One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve."

Thoreau, Henry David on flowers
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"I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also."

Thoreau, Henry David on food and eating   

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"The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free."

Thoreau, Henry David on freedom
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"A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams."

Thoreau, Henry David on friends and friendship
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"We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend."

Thoreau, Henry David on friends and friendship   

"A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend."

Thoreau, Henry David on friends and friendship   

"One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then"

Thoreau, Henry David on friends and friendship   

"The language of friendship is not words but meanings."

Thoreau, Henry David on friends and friendship
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"The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend."

Thoreau, Henry David on friends and friendship
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"To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental and trifling advantages of Friendship, as that the Friend can assist in time of need by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel. Even the utmost goodwill and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody."

Thoreau, Henry David on friends and friendship   

"True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance."

Thoreau, Henry David on friends and friendship
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"I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it."

Thoreau, Henry David on generations
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"As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs."

Thoreau, Henry David on age and aging
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"The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them."

Thoreau, Henry David on age and aging   

"None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm"

Thoreau, Henry David on age and aging
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"How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets."

Thoreau, Henry David on age and aging   

"Water is the only drink for a wise man."

Thoreau, Henry David on alcohol and alcoholism
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"In the long run you hit only what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high."

Thoreau, Henry David on goals
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"It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God."

Thoreau, Henry David on god   

"Goodness is the only investment which never fails."

Thoreau, Henry David on goodness
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"The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine."

Thoreau, Henry David on government   

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"Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government."

Thoreau, Henry David on government   

"That government is best which governs least."

Thoreau, Henry David on government
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"This American government -- what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will."

Thoreau, Henry David on government   

"When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat."

Thoreau, Henry David on grammar   

"He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise."

Thoreau, Henry David on greed   

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"What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?"

Thoreau, Henry David on grief   

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"Man is the artificer of his own happiness."

Thoreau, Henry David on happiness
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"We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light."

Thoreau, Henry David on happiness   

"Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature --if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you --know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse."

Thoreau, Henry David on health   

"Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life."

Thoreau, Henry David on health
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"We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character."

Thoreau, Henry David on home
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"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."

Thoreau, Henry David on home
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"Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?"

Thoreau, Henry David on home   

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"Be true to your work, your word, and your friend."

Thoreau, Henry David on honesty
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"Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance."

Thoreau, Henry David on hospitality   

"Humility like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights."

Thoreau, Henry David on humility
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"To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle."

Thoreau, Henry David on idleness
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"I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?"

Thoreau, Henry David on imagination
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"It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive."

Thoreau, Henry David on imagination
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