In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Indeed, the best books have a use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not anticipated in the… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma; a… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
“Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings, — The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
“This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the… — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
The still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
Concord's little arch does not span all our fate, nor is what transpires under it law for the universe. — Henry David Thoreau Copy Share Image
