Quotes About Thoreau

A few voices, strict and punctilious, like Shelley's, like Thoreau's, cry out: Change! Change! But most don't say that; they simply say: Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too. Teilhard de Chardin was not talking about how to escape anguish, but about how to live with it.

But the idea of America, the promise of America: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even me. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"—that was my America. The America Tocqueville wrote about, the countryside of Whitman and Thoreau, with no person my inferior or my better; the America of pioneers heading west in search of a better life or immigrants landing on Ellis Island, propelled by a yearning for freedom.

In the words of Thoreau, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root." We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.

Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the "I'm OK, They're Not" illusion), which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.19

Evidence-free pronouncements about the misery of mankind are an occupational hazard of the social critic. In the 1854 classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ.

In the 1854 classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ.

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs.

The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent.

I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.

As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend.

I used to have a lot of fights with Martin about his theory about disobeying the law," Marshall said in an interview years later. "I didn't believe in that. I thought you did have a right to disobey the law, and you also had a right to go to jail for it, and he kept talking about Henry David Thoreau, and I told him that Thoreau wrote his book ["Civil Disobedience"] in jail. If you want to write a book, you go to jail and write it.

When you're reading Thoreau you look at Hollywood differently, let me tell ya!

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere.

It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.

In wildness is the preservation of the world, Thoreau once wrote; a century later, when many of the wild places are no more, Wendell Berry has proposed this necessary corollary: In human culture is the preservation of wildness.

Love is no individual's experience; and though we are imperfect mediums, it does not partake of our imperfection; though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal.

Thoreau was an idiot.

But even men far tougher and more attuned to the wilderness than Thoreau were sobered by its strange and palpable menace. Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as "so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror." When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it's time to watch your step.

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.

Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.