Quote

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old return to them. Things do not change we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

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
Things
Trouble
Sell
Life
Friends
Sells
Like
Turns
Garden
Society
Clothes
Herb
Whether
Poverty
Herbs
Keep
Thoughts
Consumerism
Change
Return
Cultivate
Much
Turn
Sage

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.
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One should be always on the trail of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.
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Instead of water we got here a draught of beer, a lumberer's drink, which would acclimate and naturalize a man at once,-which would make him see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sough among the pines.
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The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself.
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Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.
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Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime?
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In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.
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In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
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We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
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To have made even one person's life a little better, that is to succeed.
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A temple, you know, was anciently an open place without a roof, whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.
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For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself
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A sufficiently great and generous trust could never be abused.
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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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The universe expects every man to do his duty in his parallel of latitude.
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The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.
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When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.
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Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.
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Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
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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.
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