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The vessel, though her masts be firm,Beneath her copper bears a worm.

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
Firm
Bears
Though
Masts
Copper
Worm
Vessel
Worms
Beneath

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At least let us have healthy books.
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Who hears the fishes when they cry?
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If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.
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I love the broad margin to my life.
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That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living.
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There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.
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I am grateful for what I have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
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I have climbed several higher mountains without guide or path, and have found, as might be expected, that it takes only more time and patience commonly than to travel the smoothest highway.
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How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
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I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not truly lived.
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What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle in a high moral sense they were not men at all.
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The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment.
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Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum - many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
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Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
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Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
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Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.
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A little thought is sexton to all the world.
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The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively,as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned.
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Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse.
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Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.
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