Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.

For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?

Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him.

The theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny accomplishment. It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so-called practical.

A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.

Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.

Insane!... Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane?

The brave man braves nothing, nor knows he of his bravery.

Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness.

We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many.

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man?

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.

I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer.

There is considerable danger that a man will be crazy between dinner and supper; but it will not directly answer any good purposethat I know of, and it is just as easy to be sane.

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.

We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.

A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.

I was daily intoxicated, yet no man could call me intemperate.

The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burrs.

There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.