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Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Better
Destroy
Conservation
Every
Creatures
Understands
Men
Dead
Preserve
Life
Tree
Preserves
Environment
Creature
Aright
Alive
Forests
Moose
Rather
Trees
Pine
Inspirational
Environmental
Ecology

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No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.
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The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
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How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.
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Don't spend your time in drilling soldiers, who may turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for.
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The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.
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I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.
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When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street,--not being inclined to change my dress,--to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.
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As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
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You speak of poverty and dependence. Who are poor and dependent? Who are rich and independent? When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?
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There is no remedy for love but to love more.
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Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?
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We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which came and went on the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there.
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The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.
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Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it.
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Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.
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Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
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Every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,--shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter acceptas special or general providences but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. Another deluge would disgrace mankind.
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We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.
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The only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success,--the ability to do some slight thing better. We make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part,--at least apparently,--but sometimes these are cinnamon and spices, you know.
Henry David Thoreau