Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven

SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, There goes a Sainte-Terrer, a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

Morning is when I'm awake, and there is dawn in me.

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Viešoji nuomon? - ne toks baisus tironas kaip savoji. Tai, k? žmogus galvoja apie save, kaip tik ir lemia arba grei?iau rodo jo likim?.

I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him every day by day, and the divine being established.

As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life. It is never isolated, or simply added as treasure to our stock. When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made

A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.

We know but few man, a great many coats and breeches.

But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run amok against society; but I preferred that society should run amok against me, it being the desperate party.

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

There are thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.