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Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

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
Soil
World
Crop
Bore
Crops
Bores
Mythology
Exhausted

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I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.
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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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The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
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As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life.
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The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.
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Where is the unexplored land but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is unexplored land, to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.
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I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.
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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 have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.
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Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward habitually at an elevated angle, it is as if it were redeemed. When the desire to be better than we are is really sincere we are instantly elevated, and so far better already.
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As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
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What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
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I think it would be worth the while to introduce a school of children to such [an oak grove], that they may get an idea of the primitive oaks before they are all gone, instead of hiring botanists to lecture to them when it is too late.
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Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
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A temple, you know, was anciently an open place without a roof, whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.
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Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
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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 Slothful do not have the time to become virtuous or despicable.
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But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.
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Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
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