Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance, a palace or temple on earth, and at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.

How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

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

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

With wisdom we shall learn liberality.

Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.

The savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but the philosopher lives simply through wisdom.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination

If common sense had been consulted, how many marriages would never have taken place; if uncommon or divine sense, how few marriages such as we witness would ever have taken place!

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

When I hear a grown man or woman say, "Once I had faith in men, now I have not," I am inclined to ask, "Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?"

To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.

The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.