Quote

Whatever beauty we behold, the more it is distant, serene, and cold, the purer and more durable it is. It is better to warm ourselves with ice than with fire.

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
Ice
Warm
Cold
Purer
Fire
Durable
Beauty
Serene
Whatever
Behold
Better
Distant
Warmth

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In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would bepale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so.
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The monster is never just there where we think he is. What is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth.
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Most men cry better than they speak. You get more nurture out of them by pinching than addressing them.
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Truly, our greatest blessings are very cheap.
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Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
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Fire is the most tolerable third party
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The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.
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What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.
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Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.
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To have made even one person's life a little better, that is to succeed.
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All men recognize the right of revolution that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.
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Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.
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Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.
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Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.
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It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.
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You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.
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The higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height there is no change.
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If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.
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When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?
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