Books Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

— Henry David Thoreau

The Library is a wilderness of books.

— Henry David Thoreau

At least let us have healthy books.

— Henry David Thoreau

Do not read the newspapers.

— Henry David Thoreau

The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.

— Henry David Thoreau

I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents.

— Henry David Thoreau

“Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all

— Henry David Thoreau

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

— Henry David Thoreau

Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.

— Henry David Thoreau

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.

— Henry David Thoreau

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise...”

— Henry David Thoreau

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task…

— Henry David Thoreau

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its…

— Henry David Thoreau

We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.

— Henry David Thoreau

“The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of…

— Henry David Thoreau

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those…

— Henry David Thoreau

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in…

— Henry David Thoreau

Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.

— Henry David Thoreau

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is…

— Henry David Thoreau

Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand…

— Henry David Thoreau

We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates…

— Henry David Thoreau

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man…

— Henry David Thoreau

Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul;but…

— Henry David Thoreau

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the…

— Henry David Thoreau

It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book.…

— Henry David Thoreau

“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate…

— Henry David Thoreau

Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint,…

— Henry David Thoreau

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite…

— Henry David Thoreau

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow…

— Henry David Thoreau

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of…

— Henry David Thoreau

“I have read in a Hindoo book, that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city,…

— Henry David Thoreau

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task…

— Henry David Thoreau

“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which,…

— Henry David Thoreau

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely…

— Henry David Thoreau

“In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is…

— Henry David Thoreau

A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for.

— Henry David Thoreau

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.

— Henry David Thoreau

A modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age.

— Henry David Thoreau

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

— Henry David Thoreau