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Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.

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
Seek
Free
Care
Adventures
Dawn
Rise
Adventure

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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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.
Henry David Thoreau
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I never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud-puddle he comes out honor-bright from behind every storm. Let us then take sides with the sun, seeing we have so much leisure.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere for that will leaven the whole lump.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we beginto keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
Henry David Thoreau
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While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
Henry David Thoreau
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Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these are our cliffs bare?
Henry David Thoreau
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There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.
Henry David Thoreau
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The savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but the philosopher lives simply through wisdom.
Henry David Thoreau
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Spring. March fans it, April christens it, and May puts on its jacket and trousers.
Henry David Thoreau
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Those who work much do not work hard.
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
Henry David Thoreau
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Even the best things are not equal to their fame.
Henry David Thoreau
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The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.
Henry David Thoreau
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Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
Henry David Thoreau
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Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.
Henry David Thoreau
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There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!
Henry David Thoreau
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Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
Henry David Thoreau
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I have seen more men than usual, lately and, well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.
Henry David Thoreau
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Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature -if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you -know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.
Henry David Thoreau