Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

The silence rings—it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible—I hear the unspeakable.

I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do.

Warm your body by healthful exercise, not by cowering over a stove.

I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

This cold and solitude are friends of mine.

A howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. -

I wish to forget, a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men (and this requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.

and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.

No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles.

The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature.

This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.

But never mind; faint heart never won true Friend. O Friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my Friend I may be yours.

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.

It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When

It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve?

Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.

He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.