Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures.

To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.

Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

If we would aim at perfection in any thing, simplicity must not be overlooked.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.

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

Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a mans real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

Life in us is like the water in a river.

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.