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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

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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
House
Bend
Uncertain
Submit
Decide
Instinct
Walk
Steps
Walks
Whither

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Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.
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The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
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The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?
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In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.
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Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.
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Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.
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Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
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Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots.
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What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.
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The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.
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I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
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The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.
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The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.
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I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
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If you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with all of its applications.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
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As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
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In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.
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We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which came and went on the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there.
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Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
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