Henry David Thoreau Quotes

If I am visited by a thought, I chew that cud each successive morning, as long as there is any flavor in it.

They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Direct your eye inward, and you'll find / A thousand regions in your mind / Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be / Expert in home-cosmography

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled.

A man can suffocate on courtesy.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

Love is the wind, the tide, the waves, the sunshine. Its power is incalculable; it is many horse-power. It never ceases, it never slacks; it can move the globe without a resting-place; it can warm without fire; it can feed without meat; it can clothe without garments; it can shelter without roof; it can make a paradise within which will dispense with a paradise without.

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.

A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

No man’s thoughts are new, but the style of their expression is the never-failing novelty which cheers and refreshes men.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.