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All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
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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Naturalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Motivational
Rather
Something
Men
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.
Henry David Thoreau
We cannot well do without our sins they are the highway of our virtue.
Henry David Thoreau
Don't be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!
Henry David Thoreau
. . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
Henry David Thoreau
I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.
Henry David Thoreau
The cost of a thing is something called life which is given in exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau
Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?
Henry David Thoreau
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.
Henry David Thoreau
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
Henry David Thoreau
The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.
Henry David Thoreau
For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?
Henry David Thoreau
I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.
Henry David Thoreau
The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate.
Henry David Thoreau
I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite.
Henry David Thoreau
There is such a thing as caste, even in the West but it is comparatively faint it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial.
Henry David Thoreau
Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.
Henry David Thoreau
I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.
Henry David Thoreau
The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son ofearth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshipers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
That man is richest who's pleasure are cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
