Quote

It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover what God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know what I mean.

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
Name
Alone
Names
Sure
Turning
Away
Discover
Mean
God
Going
Leaving
Meet

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Image
So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Bread may not always nourish us but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The Slothful do not have the time to become virtuous or despicable.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
We do not live by justice, but by grace.
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
I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
To forget all about your mistakes adds to them perhaps.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
In their daily life, all are braver than they know.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. ... Shall we always study to obtain more, and not sometimes be content with less?
Henry David Thoreau