Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.

The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair.

He understood, as he would write in Walking, that the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures.

No puedo creer que nuestro sistema industrial sea el mejor modo por el que podamos vestirnos. La condición de los obreros se parece cada día más a la de los ingleses y no hay que sorprenderse, ya que, por lo que he oído y observado, el objetivo principal no es que la humanidad esté bien y honestamente vestida, sino, indudablemente, que las corporaciones se enriquezcan.

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.

How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man.

Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not.

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now.

Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a standard man?

The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

Alles, was unserer körperlichen Ernährung und Pflege dient, lassen wir uns mehr kosten als unsere geistige Ernährung.

Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.

The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live.

I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, New earths, and skies and seas around. —

How godlike, how immortal, is he?

I am grateful for what I am and have. My Thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing to definite - only a sense of existence