Quotes About Thoreau

Every American who checks the spiritual-but-not-religious box or shuffles off to a meditation retreat is squarely in the Transcendentalist lineage. A surprising number of the people I interviewed, when recalling the origins of their interest in Eastern philosophy, named Emerson or Thoreau as a catalyst.

Thoreau's declaration in "Civil Disobedience": "I heartily accept the motto—'That government is best which governs least.

Podía intentar explicar que se regía por un código de orden superior; argumentar que, como moderno seguidor de las ideas de Henry David Thoreau, había adoptado como evangelio el ensayo titulado Sobre el deber de la desobediencia civil y consideraba que no someterse a unas leyes opresivas e injustas era una obligación moral.

He ate arugula ("rocket," the old farmers called it) so strong it made his eyes water, like a paragraph of Thoreau.

I stood in the shadiest corner I could find with my mass-market paperback and, with a red pencil, went through and underlined a lot of particularly bracing sentences: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

In the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, I fear, men never attain to.

The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.

For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?

Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.

For the most part, the best man's spirit makes a fearful sprite to haunt his grave.

The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.

And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

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.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond to conduct his famous two-year experiment in simple living in large part so that he could refine his philosophy of life and thereby avoid misliving: A primary motive in going to Walden, he tells us, was his fear that he would, "when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau, for example, doesn't directly mention Stoicism or any of the great Stoics in Walden, his masterpiece, but to those who know what to look for, the Stoic influence is present. In his Journal, Thoreau is more forthcoming. He writes, for example, that "Zeno the Stoic stood in precisely the same relation to the world that I do now.

Thoreau once said if you see a man approach you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life; it is hard to restrain the impulse in talking with social engineers.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are.