Quotes by Thoreau, Henry David

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off."

Thoreau, Henry David on independence
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"We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described."

Thoreau, Henry David on influence
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"To inherit property is not to be born -- it is to be still-born, rather."

Thoreau, Henry David on inheritance   

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

Thoreau, Henry David on inspiration
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"What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life."

Thoreau, Henry David on instinct   

"The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails -- aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail."

Thoreau, Henry David on institutions   

"Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society."

Thoreau, Henry David on institutions   

"The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day."

Thoreau, Henry David on integrity   

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"We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing."

Thoreau, Henry David on intelligence and intellectuals   

"We hate the kindness which we understand."

Thoreau, Henry David on kindness   

"Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven."

Thoreau, Henry David on knowledge   

"The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot."

Thoreau, Henry David on knowledge   

"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

Thoreau, Henry David on knowledge
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"We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character."

Thoreau, Henry David on language   

"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right."

Thoreau, Henry David on law and lawyers   

"Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it."

Thoreau, Henry David on law and lawyers   

"The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency."

Thoreau, Henry David on law and lawyers   

"I say, break the law."

Thoreau, Henry David on law and lawyers   

"He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate."

Thoreau, Henry David on leisure
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"A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?"

Thoreau, Henry David on leisure   

"I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage."

Thoreau, Henry David on letters   

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."

Thoreau, Henry David on liberty
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"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

Thoreau, Henry David on life
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"If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for."

Thoreau, Henry David on life   

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion."

Thoreau, Henry David on life
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"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest."

Thoreau, Henry David on life
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"The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?"

Thoreau, Henry David on achievement
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"What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground."

Thoreau, Henry David on animals   

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"The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams."

Thoreau, Henry David on animals   

"True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism."

Thoreau, Henry David on architecture   

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"Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts -- a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments."

Thoreau, Henry David on army and navy   

"There is no remedy for love than to love more."

Thoreau, Henry David on love
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"Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame."

Thoreau, Henry David on love
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"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."

Thoreau, Henry David on luxury   

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"The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest."

Thoreau, Henry David on masses   

"In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds."

Thoreau, Henry David on mathematics   

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"We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

Thoreau, Henry David on media   

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

Thoreau, Henry David on mediocrity
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"Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them."

Thoreau, Henry David on memory   

"Of what significance are the things you can forget."

Thoreau, Henry David on memory
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