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We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

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
Important
Construct
Great
Haste
Constructs
Texas
Communicate
Communication
Telegraph
May
Maine
Nothing
Magnetic

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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We live but a fraction of our lives.
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Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.
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Even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.
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In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.
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A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
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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.
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The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.
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The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.
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Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading?
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I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.
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The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.
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I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
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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!
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Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. . . . Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
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Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
Henry David Thoreau
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I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
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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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Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll go canoeing.
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.
Henry David Thoreau
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Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.
Henry David Thoreau