Henry David Thoreau Quotes

"The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer."

"If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things."

"When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."

"The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it."

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. 1847"

"What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through purer stratum. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far stratum in the sky. 1850"

"Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. p. 245"

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

"Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages.  But many are no more worthily employed now. p. 485"

"Referring to an 1849 dairyman's strike, during which there was suspicion of milk being watered down"

"There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes."

"My life has been the poem I would have writ,But I could not both live and utter it. My Life Has Been a Poem I Would Have Writ"

"It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals."

"We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up. p. 491"

"This essay was derived from the lecture "What Shall It Profit?" which Thoreau first delivered on 6 December 1854, at Railroad Hall in Providence, Rhode Island. He delivered it several times over the next two years, and edited it for publication before he died in 1862. It was first published in the October 1863 issue of The Atlantic Monthly where it was given its modern title."

"A gun gives you the body, not the bird. Quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in C. J. Woodbury (ed.) Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890)"

"For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?"

"Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. "Natural History of Massachusetts". The Dial (July 1842) p. 39"

"But now I see I was not plucked for naught,And after in life's vaseOf glass set while I might survive,But by a kind hand broughtAliveTo a strange place. "Sic Vita", st. 6. The Dial (July 1841) p. 82"

"If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."

"You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world. p. 490"

"Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us."

"And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it. After December 6, 1845"

"A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies."

"And now, at half-past ten o'clock, I hear the cockerels crow in Hubbard's barns, and morning is already anticipated. It is the feathered, wakeful thought in us that anticipates the following day. July 11, 1851"

"The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence. p. 493"

"It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men. p. 489"

"I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me."

"He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man."

"It takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear."

"Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity of friends, or a government-pension, — provided you continue to breathe, — by whatever fine synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. p. 487"

"You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing. Last letter, to Myron Benton (March 31, 1862)"

"We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes. April 9, 1841"