Quotes About Thoreau

In my cheapest moments I am apt to think that it is n't my business to be "seeking the spirit," but as much its business to be seeking me.

Seeds, there are seeds enough which need only be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor.

What about the duty to protest? What Mark was doing is as old as Thoreau. Civil disobedience is as American as—killing Indians!" His father smiled, just the smallest curving of his mouth. "That answers itself, Son.

Thoreau went to jail, not to Canada. That's civil disobedience. The other is self-interest, cloaked with morality.

The rest of our weekend sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, hand-prepared food was simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who confused rustic vacations with life.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

She has lived far from commerce for decades, and yet her name is a hot commodity, bought and sold endlessly as she sits in her cabin reading Thoreau. She hopes the buyers aren't paying much. No: she hopes they're being extorted.

Let's face it, Thoreau; you can't live in America today and be quietly different. If you are going to be different, you are going to stand out, and people are going to hear about you; and in your case, if they hear about you, they will remove you to the city or move to you and you won't be different anymore.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

I try to be honorable. I know that's embarrassing to hear. It's embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms.

My actual life is a fact, in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak.

But what I was going to say was, I just figured I'm going to go boldly in the direction of my dreams, say it as Thoreau would say, and just see where it takes me.

What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made agents of injustice.

Concord is a classic land. The names of Emerson and Thoreau and Channing and Hawthorne are associated with the fields and forests and lakes and rivers of this township.

I'll go live in the woods," said Malone. "You'll be lonely," said Sutherland. "Even Thoreau went to town in the afternoon to gossip.

I have never got over my surprise," Thoreau once reflected, "that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too.

Thoreau once said, 'Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

Be careful... What the dude said, ain't it? ... One lived in the woods and didn't pay his taxes. Musta been before Lyme disease, when you could still get by with that shit. You know the dude I talkin' about. Said to watch out for jobs you got to dress up for." "Thoreau." "Yeah, that's him.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

To have a life that is in any way detached from the megatechnic complex , to say nothing of being cockily independent of it, or recalcitrant to its demands, is regarded as nothing less than a form of sabotage. Hence the fury evoked by the Hippies-quite apart from any objectionable behavior. On megatechnic terms complete withdrawal is heresy and treason, if not evidence of unsound mind. The arch-enemy of the Affluent Economy would not be Karl Marx but Henry Thoreau.

I have seen more men than usual, lately; and, well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are.

Henry David Thoreau, by no means the most conventional man of his time, lamented on his death bed, "What demon possessed me that I behaved so well." He would have taken comfort in Holy Fools. They remind us of a deeper sanity that is sometimes hidden beneath apparent lunacy: the treasure of a God-centered life.

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