Quote

The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.

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
Lives
Sail
Play
Thin
Noiseless
Life
Effective
Nautical
Like
Boat
Labors
Hardest
Noisy
Labor
Impatient
Least
Pulse
Full
Sailing

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The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.
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When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.
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They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.
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To speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left.
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Birds never sing in caves.
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I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side.
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Don't be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.
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Music is the crystallization of sound.
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I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
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I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that I might go a- fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned.
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Impulse is, after all, the best linguist its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.
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Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
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I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.
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Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East -- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them -- who were above such trifling.
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The state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice and so do the neighborhood and the family. What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.
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We are older by faith than by experience.
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Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.
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I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
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It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
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The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.
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