Quotes About Thoreau

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

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.

He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When

They required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still.

For I believe that climate does thus react on man--as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires.

My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there but to transact some private business, with the fewest obstacles… It's a good place for business... it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge.

If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world.

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.

It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All

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.

I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame. No:

for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.

Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag & exaggeration.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask.

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.

I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obli­gation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. 

Have you got in your wood for this winter? What else have you got in? Of what use a great fire on the hearth, and a confounded little fire in the heart?

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

There is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures.

Thus no life or experience goes unreported at last; but if it be not solid gold it is gold-leaf, which gilds the furniture of the mind.

should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about rafters?