Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it...At last we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing....

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.

Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.