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Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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Thoreau
Back
Woods
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Leave
Sometimes
Went
Life
Came
World
Understanding
Society
Learn
Shunned

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It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?
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There is no history of how bad became better.
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Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
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One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought.
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The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.
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To forget all about your mistakes adds to them perhaps.
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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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The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.
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See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
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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.
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The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
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Even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. We do not wish for Friends to feed and clothe our bodies-neighbors are kind enough for that-but to do the like office to our spirits.
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The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle.
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Yet we must try the harder, the less the prospect of success.
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There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.
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Our molting season, like that of the fouls, must be a crisis in our lives.
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What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love.
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There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
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Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.
Henry David Thoreau