Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived. These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.

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 reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.

I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant

If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.

The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art.

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. It is as common as life.

One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?

What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth for my friend. I expect to meet him at every turn; but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me.

Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.

I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead.

if injustice, is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

If some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath.

I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body.

If you can speak what you will never hear,—if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

What sort of cultivation, or civilization and improvement, is ours to boast of, if it turns out that, as in this instance, unhandselled nature is worth more even by our modes of valuation than our improvements are,—if we leave the land poorer than we found it?

Warum leben wir in solcher Hast, mit solcher Vergeudung von Leben? Wir glauben, Hungers zu sterben, bevor wir hungrig sind. Es heißt, ein Stich zur rechten Zeit erspart neun andere - also werden lieber gleich tausend Stiche gemacht, um neun für den nächsten Tag zu ersparen.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.

There is a low mist in the woods— It is a good day to study lichens.

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then throwing them back again, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.