Henry David Thoreau Quotes

1565 quotes in 10709 categories

• We need the tonic of the wilderness, to wade sometimes in the marsh where the bitten and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming…
• The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a…
• I do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.
• My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
• No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.
• To be awake is to be alive.
• When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?
• Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
• As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded…
• If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such…
• Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well.
• The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
• You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and,…
• Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the…
• Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but…
• Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety…
• We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful…
• To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.
• Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist. With the least inclination to…
• We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

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