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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.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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The wisest man preaches no doctrines he has no scheme he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.
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I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
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We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.
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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 truth is, there is money buried everywhere, and you have only to go to work to find it.
Henry David Thoreau
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If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.
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Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature is full of genius, full of divinity.
Henry David Thoreau
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As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend.
Henry David Thoreau
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If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.
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Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport.
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If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
Henry David Thoreau
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Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.
Henry David Thoreau
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I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.
Henry David Thoreau
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Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it.
Henry David Thoreau
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What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?
Henry David Thoreau
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We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.
Henry David Thoreau
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I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.
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As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau