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We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]

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
Paid
Events
Thereby
Rather
Suspect
Find
Suspects
Good
Suspicion
Always
Findings
Life
Finding
People
Gratitude

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We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
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The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.
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What is sour in the house a bracing walk in the woods makes sweet.
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Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
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Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
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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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Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
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A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.
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The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.
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Some do not walk at all others walk in the highways a few walk across lots.
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Eastward I go only by force but westward I go free.
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There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law.
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We are superior to the joy we experience.
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What is religion? That which is never spoken.
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Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
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The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
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I bought me a spy-glass some weeks since. I buy but a few things, and those not till long after I begin to want them, so that when I do get them I am prepared to make a perfect use of them and extract their whole sweet.
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Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old return to them. Things do not change we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
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The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.
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The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.
Henry David Thoreau