Henry David Thoreau Quotes

There are two seasons when the leaves are in their glory, their green and perfect youth in June and this their ripe old age.

The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men? — if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?

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.

It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.

Whatever book or sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.

It is worth the while to walk in wet weather; the earth and leaves are strewn with pearls. What you can recall of a walk on the second day will differ from what you remember on the first day, as the mountain chain differs in appearance, looking back the next day, from the aspect it wore when you were at its base, or generally, as any view changes to one who is journeying amid mountains when he has increased the distance.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.

He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.

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

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Ever and anon something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of. The limits of the actual are set some thoughts further off. That which had seemed a rigid wall of vast thickness unexpectedly proves a thin and undulating drapery.

If my friend would take a quarter part the pains to show me himself that he does to show me a piece of roast beef, I should feel myself irresistibly invited.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented.

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?