Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Même lorsque vous votez pour la justice, vous ne faites rien pour elle. Vous ne faites qu'exprimer faiblement aux hommes votre désir de la voir l'emporter. Le sage ne doit pas laisser la justice à la merci du hasard ni souhaiter qu'elle l'emporte grâce au pouvoir de la majorité. P.13

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans

the devil finds employment for the idle —

But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?

Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever?

A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of...

Os únicos seres felizes no mundo são os que gozam livremente de um vasto horizonte

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated... There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,- the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has gotten up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time.

The wind that blows Is all that any body knows.

me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.

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. He should have gone up garret at once. What!

Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me

So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.

There was such a repose and quiet here at this hour, as if the very hill-sides were enjoying the scene, and as we passed slowly along, looking back over the country we had traversed, and listening to the evening song of the robin, we could not help contrasting the equanimity of nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume always a crises near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending." - A Walk to Wachusett

Gastamos mais em praticamente qualquer item de nossa saúde física ou falta da saúde física do que em nossa saúde mental

An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.

my greatest skill has been to want but little

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.

I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

Acho saudável ficar sozinho a maior parte do tempo. Ter companhia, mesmo a melhor delas, logo cansa e desgasta