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Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
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Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
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What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?
Henry David Thoreau
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The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, andagain, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.
Henry David Thoreau
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The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
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We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.
Henry David Thoreau
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Surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. Cold and damp ? are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness?
Henry David Thoreau
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Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures do for themselves.
Henry David Thoreau
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The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
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Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.
Henry David Thoreau
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Time is like a handful of sand - the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us.
Henry David Thoreau
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My Friend is that one whom I can associate with my choicest thought.
Henry David Thoreau
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Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed.
Henry David Thoreau
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We cannot well do without our sins they are the highway of our virtue.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.
Henry David Thoreau
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The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
Henry David Thoreau