Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Experience bereaves us of our innocence; wisdom bereaves us of our ignorance.

We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wilderness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.

The gardener with all his assiduity does not raise such a variety, nor so many successive crops on the same place, as Nature in the very roadside ditches.

I must confess there is nothing so strange to me as my own body. I love any other piece of nature, almost, better.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.

Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.

My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of.

That which we love is so mixed and entangled with that we hate in one another that we are more grieved and disappointed, aye, and estranged from one another, by meeting than by absence.

As for the sensuality in Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass, ” I do not so much wish that it was not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read it without harm.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper.