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A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
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
Grain
Surface
Gold
Wisdom
Great
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Gild
More quotes by 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
Tough times don't last but tough people do. No matter how slow you go, you are still lapping everybody on the couch. Men are born to succeed, not fail.
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
Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.
Henry David Thoreau
I have myself to respect, but to myself I am not amiable but my friend is my amiableness personified.
Henry David Thoreau
To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Henry David Thoreau
All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.
Henry David Thoreau
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety.
Henry David Thoreau
Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.
Henry David Thoreau
City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
Henry David Thoreau
The fishermen say that the thundering of the pond scares the fishes and prevents their biting.
Henry David Thoreau
Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.
Henry David Thoreau
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
Henry David Thoreau
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.
Henry David Thoreau
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador a greater wildness than in some recess of Concord.
Henry David Thoreau
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Henry David Thoreau
There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.
Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.
Henry David Thoreau
You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?
Henry David Thoreau
