Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour of four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

When you knock, ask to see God — none of the servants.

Even the death of friends will inspire us as much as their lives…. Their memories will be encrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our friends have no place in the graveyard.

What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!

Live the life you've dreamed.

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

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 man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog than to any human being.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

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

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.