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The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Right
Concede
Property
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.
Henry David Thoreau
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
Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.
Henry David Thoreau
Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.
Henry David Thoreau
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
Impulse is, after all, the best linguist its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.
Henry David Thoreau
Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.
Henry David Thoreau
Why look in the dark for light?
Henry David Thoreau
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.
Henry David Thoreau
I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.
Henry David Thoreau
Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.
Henry David Thoreau
A person who chooses to die or to risk death demonstrates that there are values, principles, maxims, that are more valuable to him than is life itself. In short, he places his immortal self above his mortal self. Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
Henry David Thoreau
A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more harmonious compositions.
Henry David Thoreau
That man is richest who's pleasure are cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
Henry David Thoreau
The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.
Henry David Thoreau
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.
Henry David Thoreau
