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It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

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
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Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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Even trees do not die without a groan.
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The tavern will compare favorably with the church.
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What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.
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I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
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Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest.
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The researcher is more memorable than the researched.
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Write while the heat is in you.
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There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.
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What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.
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It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.
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If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?
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It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
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The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.
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The cost of a thing is something called life which is given in exchange for it.
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I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
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Real power is measured by how much you can let things be.
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I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
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We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.
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I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.
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Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
Henry David Thoreau