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Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.

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
Sense
Thus
Wit
States
Physical
Superior
Intellectual
Superiors
Body
Strength
Forced
Never
Fashion
Revolutionary
Men
Moral
Senses
Confronts
State
Breathe
Intentionally
Born
Honesty
Armed

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That man is richest who's pleasure are cheapest.
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Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.
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Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.
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To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.
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Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause - nor any charter of immunities and rights.
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The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July.
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I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon.
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Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.
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You don't know your testament when you see it.
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In all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin.
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Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
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Our thoughts are epochs in our lives all else is but as a journal of the winds that blow while we are here.
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Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work.
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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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When I meet a government which says to me, Your money or your life, why should I be in haste to give it my money?
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All things in this world must be seen with youthful, hopeful eyes.
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