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The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.

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
Earth
Particles
Body
Fluid
Organic
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Influence
Dead
Inert
Whatever
Particle
Spirit
Tread

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?
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All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
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When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.
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My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table but I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will.
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The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love.
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We fritter away our energy and creativity . . . we get bogged down in the thick of thin things.
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Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
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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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It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living: how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.
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The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.
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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.
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This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient more beautiful than it is useful it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.
Henry David Thoreau
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The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end?
Henry David Thoreau
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Oh to reach the point of death and realize one has not lived at all.
Henry David Thoreau
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Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two.
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The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.
Henry David Thoreau
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This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?
Henry David Thoreau
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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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It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
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Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.
Henry David Thoreau