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I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
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
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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Spare
Left
Spares
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Several
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Woods
Good
Seemed
Time
Perhaps
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Lives
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.
Henry David Thoreau
Like speaks to like only labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
Henry David Thoreau
I find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. It is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind onlyreaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. Our conversation is a smooth, and civil, and never-ending speculation merely.
Henry David Thoreau
The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.
Henry David Thoreau
I knew that the wall was the main thing in Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money.... In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is true.
Henry David Thoreau
The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth...these glorious spangles, the sweeping of heaven's floor.
Henry David Thoreau
The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.
Henry David Thoreau
It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.
Henry David Thoreau
He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach.
Henry David Thoreau
Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.
Henry David Thoreau
Those who work much do not work hard.
Henry David Thoreau
The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must bestripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living laid for a foundation.
Henry David Thoreau
It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!
Henry David Thoreau
We cannot well do without our sins they are the highway of our virtue.
Henry David Thoreau
Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.
Henry David Thoreau
We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend.
Henry David Thoreau
WE begin to die not in our sense or extremities, but in our divine faculties.
Henry David Thoreau
There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.
Henry David Thoreau
We make needless ado about capital punishment,--taking lives, when there is no life to take.
Henry David Thoreau
