Quote

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

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
Four
Solitude
Commonly
Hours
Absolutely
Engagement
Free
Fields
Worldly
Spirit
Spend
Spirits
Nature
Walking
Preserve
Cannot
Unless
Preserves
Think
Health
Hills
Engagements
Thinking
Least
Woods
Sauntering

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Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.
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When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.
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When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.
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Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.
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Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.
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What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
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I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.
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Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
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Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.
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Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged.
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He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behaviour as well as application.
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He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. Butwe would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics.
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I was determined to know beans.
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It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.
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A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.
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The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.
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There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.
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The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen.
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The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
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Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.
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