Henry David Thoreau

The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no…

— Henry David Thoreau

Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.

— Henry David Thoreau

When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.

— Henry David Thoreau

Fire is the most tolerable third party

— Henry David Thoreau

To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government,…

— Henry David Thoreau

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but…

— Henry David Thoreau

Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man travel on foot along the coastand tell me…

— Henry David Thoreau

“My life has been the poem I could have writ But I could not both live and utter it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else.

— Henry David Thoreau

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labour of my hands, and I found, that by working…

— Henry David Thoreau

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

— Henry David Thoreau

“I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing,…

— Henry David Thoreau

The most alive is the wildest.

— Henry David Thoreau

An unclean person is universally a slothful one.

— Henry David Thoreau

“Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I…

— Henry David Thoreau

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

— Henry David Thoreau

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

— Henry David Thoreau

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put…

— Henry David Thoreau

I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer.

— Henry David Thoreau

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

— Henry David Thoreau

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a…

— Henry David Thoreau

When the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the…

— Henry David Thoreau

When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?

— Henry David Thoreau

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it,…

— Henry David Thoreau

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various…

— Henry David Thoreau