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We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.

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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Ecologist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. It is the only assured tone. There are in it such strains as far surpass anyman's faith in the loftiness of his destiny. Things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn.
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If one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. Let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them.
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It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.
Henry David Thoreau
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The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, andagain, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him.
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I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.
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The improved means to the unimproved end.
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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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I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.
Henry David Thoreau
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The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.
Henry David Thoreau
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The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
Henry David Thoreau
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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
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If you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with all of its applications.
Henry David Thoreau
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We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.
Henry David Thoreau
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I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.
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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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I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.
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I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
Henry David Thoreau