Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I feel the necessity of deepening the stream of my life: I must cultivate privacy. It is very dissipating to be with people too much.

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.

Ask me for a certain number of dollars if you will, but do not ask me for my afternoons.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Who looks in the sun will see no light else; but also he will see no shadow. Our life revolves unceasingly, but the centre is ever the same, and the wise will regard only the seasons of the soul.

Never endeavor consciously to supply the tone which you think proper for certain sentences. It is as if a man whose mind was at ease should supply the tones and gestures for a man in distress who found only the words; as when one makes a speech and another behind him makes gestures.

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

It is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the east side of a mountain and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the east. Yet the universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man.

I am constantly assisted by the books in identifying a particular plant and learning some of its humbler uses, but I rarely read a sentence in a botany which reminds me of flowers or living plants. Very few indeed write as if they had seen the thing which they pretend to describe.

How silent are the footsteps of Spring!

We wonder superfluously when we hear of a somnambulist walking a plank securely, —we have walked a plank all our lives up to this particular string-piece where we are.

Most books belong to the house and streets only, ... But thIS ... addresses what is deepest and most abidlllg in man .... Its truth speaks freshly to our experience. [the sentences of Manu] are a pIece with depth and serenity and I am sure they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.