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If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

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
Landscape
Alone
Names
Men
Worthiest
Fairest
Noblest
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Features

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.
Henry David Thoreau
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I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.
Henry David Thoreau
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We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
Henry David Thoreau
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Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?--to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.
Henry David Thoreau
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Can we not do without the society of our gossip a little while, - have our own thoughts to cheer us?
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
Henry David Thoreau
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I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.
Henry David Thoreau
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For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.
Henry David Thoreau
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A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,--shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter acceptas special or general providences but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. Another deluge would disgrace mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.
Henry David Thoreau
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The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
Henry David Thoreau
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The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
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The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The readeris nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.... It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.
Henry David Thoreau
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How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
Henry David Thoreau
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They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy evil, that they may no longer have have it to regret.
Henry David Thoreau
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I could lecture on dry oak leaves I could, but who would hear me? If I were to try it on any large audience, I fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. I should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends.
Henry David Thoreau
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To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.
Henry David Thoreau
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While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognitato them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.
Henry David Thoreau