Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.

not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality;

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 it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?

I heartily accept the motto, — 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

No importa que el comienzo sea pequeño; lo que se hace bien una vez, queda bien hecho para siempre.

Yo creo que no hay nada, ni tan siquiera el crimen, más opuesto a la poesía, a la filosofía, a la vida misma, que este incesante trabajar.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A

This American Government,-what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself.

It is remarkable that such delicate flowers should here adorn these wilderness paths.

My best room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one center.

beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

La legge non renderà mai gli uomini liberi; sono gli uomini a dover mantenere libera la legge.

Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity- the activity of flies about a molasses- hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.

The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.

The question is not what you look at…but what you see

Si un hombre pasea por el bosque por placer todos los días, corre el riesgo de que le tomen por un haragán, pero si dedica el día entero a especular cortando bosques y dejando la tierra árida antes de tiempo, se le estima por ser un ciudadano trabajador y emprendedor. ¡Como si una ciudad no tuviera más interés en sus bosques que el de talarlos!

What shall we do with a man who is afraid of the woods, their solitude and darkness? What salvation is there for him? God is silent and mysterious. Some of our richest days are those in which no sun shines outwardly, but so much the more a sun shines inwardly. I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere.

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.