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The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

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
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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Uprightness
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Lives
Maple
Nature
Pine
Maples

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
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I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.
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We fritter away our energy and creativity . . . we get bogged down in the thick of thin things.
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The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that hein some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages.
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How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.
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Don't be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.
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Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
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The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.
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Bread may not always nourish us but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
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Let go of the past and live the future . . . Live the life you imagined.
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One can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contemplation and the observation of nature.
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Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
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A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
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The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banksmany a poet's stream, floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom.
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I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.
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The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.
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Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
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Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
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Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
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As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.
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