Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Our table was a large piece of freshly peeled birch bark, laid wrong side up, and our breakfast consisted of hard-bread, fried pork, and strong coffee well sweetened, in which we did not miss the milk.

Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

How little that occurs to us in any way are we prepared at once to appreciate! We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods, to preserve the whole fruit of it.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some

Let men cultivate the moral affections, lead manly independent lives; let them make riches the means and not the end of existence, and we shall hear no more of the commercial spirit. . . . This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

It is very dissipating to be with people too much ... I cannot spare my moonlight and my mountains for the best of man I am likely to get in exchange.

Not that the story need to be long, but it will take a long time to shorten it

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated.

I have come to this hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity and put myself again in relation with Nature.

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.

Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe? The globe is the richer for the variety of its inhabitants.

I make it my business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me, though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and the earth.

Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that. We are no longer the representatives of our former selves.

It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey.

not sit while the wind went by. Is the literary man to live always or chiefly sitting in a chamber through which nature enters by a window only? What is the use of the summer?

The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life! To put to rest all that was not life... And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived...

How we eat, drink, sleep, and use our desultory hours, now in these indifferent days, with no eye to observe and no occasion to excite us, determines our authority and capacity for the time to come.

Yesterday I was influenced with the rottenness of human relations. They appeared full of death and decay, and offended the nostrils.

Man] needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope.

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.