Henry David Thoreau

“Throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.”

“Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.”

“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.”

“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study.”

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

“To a philosopher all news is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”

“If we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads?”

“To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.”

“Renew thyself completely each day.”

“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.”

“Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.”

“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.”

“I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.”

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.”

“As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.”

“I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.”

“The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.”

“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”

“Simplify, simplify.”

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”

“The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.”

“A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living.”

“Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.”

“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of feeble minds”

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”

“And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur into it. We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.”

“The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

“Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.”

“I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.”

“This world is but canvas to our imaginations.”

“As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.”

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood”

“In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

“No very black melencholy can come to he who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still.....”

“It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.”

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

“Things do not change; we change.”

“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.”

“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”

“Man is the artificer of his own happiness.”

“I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.”

“For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.”

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

“I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.”

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

“Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.”