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The improved means to the unimproved end.
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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Unimproved
Improved
Environment
Means
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Mean
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.
Henry David Thoreau
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. ... Shall we always study to obtain more, and not sometimes be content with less?
Henry David Thoreau
We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.
Henry David Thoreau
When the first light dawned on the earth, and the birds awoke, and the brave river was heard rippling confidently seaward, and the nimble early rising wind rustled the oak leaves about our tent, all people, having reinforced their bodies and their souls with sleep, and cast aside doubt and fear, were invited to unattempted adventures.
Henry David Thoreau
In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson said, 'Henry, what are you doing in there?' Thoreau quietly replied, 'Ralph, what are you doing out there?'
Henry David Thoreau
Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
Henry David Thoreau
Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.
Henry David Thoreau
Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures.
Henry David Thoreau
I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.
Henry David Thoreau
Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.
Henry David Thoreau
I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.
Henry David Thoreau
Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work.
Henry David Thoreau
A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
Henry David Thoreau
If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.
Henry David Thoreau
We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
Henry David Thoreau
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
Henry David Thoreau
In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.
Henry David Thoreau
Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.
Henry David Thoreau
Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion,--as if the short spring days were an eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true and they do not always mean what they say.
Henry David Thoreau
