Quote

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.

Henry David Thoreau

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Art
Contain
Book
Glimpse
Firma
Never
Discovery
Terra
Sight
Shipwrecked
Pure
Mariners
Land
Glimpses
Though
Navigation
Reading
Discoveries

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Image
As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only the subtlest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
While some men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Why look in the dark for light?
Henry David Thoreau
Image
We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?
Henry David Thoreau
Image
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
It is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we beginto keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success,--the ability to do some slight thing better. We make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part,--at least apparently,--but sometimes these are cinnamon and spices, you know.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
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.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Good deeds are no less good because their object is unworthy.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
There is not one kind of food for all men. You must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. The laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary.
Henry David Thoreau