Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times

for the devil finds employment for the idle

But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow.

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.

The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?

After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages;

Lieber als Liebe, als Geld, als Ruhm gebt mir Wahrheit. Ich saß an einem Tische, wo feine Weine und Speisen im Überfluss vorhanden waren, wo man mich sorgsam bediente, wo es aber keine Aufrichtigkeit und Wahrheit gab. Hungrig verließ ich ihren ungastlichen Tisch. Die Gastfreundschaft war so kalt wie das Gefrorene.

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.

Still we live meanly like ants.

You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day.

What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times.

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The

That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. All memorable events ... transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say All intelligences awake in the morning. Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. Walden

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth.

The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I

Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.

Grow wild according to thy nature.