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There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art,... one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate.

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
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Life
Hunger
Poet
Poetry
Gratifies
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Cultivates
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Satisfies
Art
Palate
Two
Classes
Men
Poets

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One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then
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I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
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When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
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Every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,--shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter acceptas special or general providences but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. Another deluge would disgrace mankind.
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As all curves have reference to their centres or foci, so all beauty of character has reference to the soul, and is a graceful gesture of recognition or waving of the body toward it.
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Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
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I seem to have dodged all my days with one or two persons, and lived upon expectation,--as if the bud would surely blossom and soI am content to live.
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Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
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So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.
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We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
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Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
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Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged.
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We saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to the sounds which issued from it but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church.
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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.
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Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.
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What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?
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