Henry David Thoreau

“Die Einfachheit und Nacktheit des primitiven Menschen hatte wenigstens den Vorteil, daß er sich in der Natur als Gast fühlte. War er durch Nahrung und Schlaf erquickt, dann dachte er wieder ans Weiterziehen. Er lebte in der Welt gleichsam wie in einem Zelt, durchstreifte die Täler, überquerte die Ebenen oder kletterte auf Berge. Aber die Menschen haben sich zu Werkzeugen ihrer Werkzeuge gemacht! Der Mensch, der sich frei und unabhängig Beeren pflückte, wenn er hungrig war, ist Farmer geworden, und der einst unter einem Baum Schutz suchte, Hausbesitzer. Wir schlagen nicht mehr für eine Nacht unser Zelt auf, sondern haben uns auf der Erde ansässig gemacht und den Himmel vergessen. Wir haben die christliche Kultur angenommen, doch nur als verbesserte Methode der Agri-Kultur. Wir haben für diese Welt ein Familienhaus und für die andere ein Familiengrab errichtet.”

“We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.”

“The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.”

“It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

“The true and not despairing Friend will address his Friend in some such terms as these."I never asked thy leave to let me love thee,--I have a right. I love thee not as something private and personal, which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, which I have found. O, how I think of you! You are purely good, --you are infinitely good. I can trust you forever. I did not think that humanity was so rich. Give me an opportunity to live.”

“It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.”

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”

“Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.”

“It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, – for a man lost, – do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

“Ich stelle mir bei meinen Bekannten manchmal die Frage: Würde er einen Flicken oder auch nur zwei Extranähte auf seinem Hosenknie ertragen? Die meisten benehmen sich, als würde das alle ihre Zukunftsaussichten zunichte machen. Eher würden sie mit einem gebrochenen Bein in die Stadt humpeln als mit einer zerrissenen Hose. Wenn die Beine eines Herrn bei einem Unfall zu Schaden kommen, können sie oft wieder geheilt werden; wenn jedoch ein ähnlicher Unfall den Beinen seiner Hose zustößt, kommt jede Hilfe zu spät; denn ihn kümmert nicht, was wirklich achtenswert ist, sondern das, was geachtet wird. Wir kennen nur wenige Menschen, aber sehr viele Überröcke und Hosen. Man ziehe einer Vogelscheuche seinen neuesten Anzug an und stelle sich nackt daneben: Wer würde nicht zuerst die Vogelscheuche begrüßen?”

“A wise man has doubts even in his best moments. Real truth is always accompanied by hesitations. If I could not hesitate, I could not believe.”

“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; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.”

“The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.”

“A bore is someone who takes away my solitude and doesn't give me companionship in return”

“Der Mensch behauptet, viel zu wissen;Doch seht nur, wie sie überschießen,Die Künste und die Wissenschaften,Die tausend Errungenschaften;Der Wind, der weht,Ist alles, was er versteht.”

“Celui qui ne résiste pas ne sera jamais vaincu.”

“It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.”

“We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.”

“The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not likethe azure ether beyond.”

“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.”

“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”

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

“What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today?”

“This [...] government [...] has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man cam bend it to his will.”

“It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked.... Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization.”

“Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still entirely unknown.”

“Truths and roses have thorns about them.”

“The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course _à la mode_.”

“Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Coulda greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other'seyes for an instant?”

“We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system ofearths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented somemistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are theapexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings inthe various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one atthe same moment!”

“The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over bytheir predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things tohave been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribedordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman prætors havedecided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather theacorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to thatneighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut ournails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter norlonger. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to haveexhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man'scapacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he cando by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thyfailures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign tothee what thou hast left undone?”

“If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”

“Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?”

“As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.”

“Ich ging in die Wälder, weil ich bewusst leben wollte.Ich wollte das Dasein auskosten. Ich wollte das Mark des Lebens einsaugen!Und alles fortwerfen, das kein Leben barg, um nicht an meinem Todestag Innezuwerden, daß ich nie gelebt hatte.”

“A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now. I find, for example, in Aristotle some thing about the spawning, etc., of the pout and perch, because I know something about it already and have my attention aroused; but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes.”

“The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.”

“Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it”

“The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”

“My life has been the poem I could have writBut I could not both live and utter it.”

“Noch niemand ward von seinem Genius in die Irre geführt. Mag das Ergebnis auch körperliche Schwäche sein, so kann doch vielleicht niemand sagen, dass die Folgen zu bedauern seien, denn dieses Leben war höheren Grundsätzen gemäß. Wenn uns Tag und Nacht so erscheinen, dass wir sie mit Freude begrüßen, wenn das Leben einen Duft ausströmt wie Blumen und würzige Kräuter, wenn es spannkräftiger, sternenreicher und mehr unsterblich wird – dann ist dies unser Erfolg. Die ganze Natur beglückwünscht uns, und wir haben Grund, uns einen Augenblick lang selig zu preisen. Die reichsten Gewinste, die höchsten Werte, werden am seltensten geschätzt. Wir kommen nur zu leicht dahin, an ihrem Dasein zu zweifeln. Wir vergessen sie bald. Und doch sind sie höchste Wirklichkeit… Die wahre Ernte meines täglichen Lebens ist etwas so Unfassbares, Unbeschreibliches wie Himmelsfarben am Morgen und Abend. Ein wenig Sternenstaub, ein Stückchen Regenbogen – das ist alles.”

“I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, New earths, and skies and seas around. —”

“My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.”

“The seasons and all their changes are in me.”

“[...] dopotutto non erano tanto nobili, ma trattavano il ladro nella stessa maniera in cui il ladro li trattava.”

“Ma il ricco [...] è sempre colluso con l'istituzione che lo fa ricco. In termini assoluti, più soldi corrispondono a minor virtù, poiché il denaro si insinua tra l'uomo e i suoi obbiettivi e glieli ottiene, però a scapito della sua onestà.”

“Una Minoranza che si conformi alla maggioranza è senza forza, non è neppure più una minoranza; ma diventa irresistibile quando si oppone con tutto il suo peso.”

“Sotto un governo che imprigiona ingiustamente non importa chi, il vero posto dove può vivere un uomo giusto è la prigione.”

“Quanto ad adottare le soluzioni offerte dallo Stato per portare rimedio al male - io, quelle soluzioni, non le conosco: richiedono troppo tempo e un uomo morirebbe prima di riuscire a metterle in atto. Ho altre cose cui badare. Venni al mondo non principalmente per trasformarlo in un luogo buono dove vivere ma per vivervi, buono o cattivo che fosse. Un uomo non deve fare tutto, ma qualche cosa; e poiché tutto non lo può fare, non è necessario che faccia qualcosa di sbagliato.”