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It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.

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
True
Thoughts
Port
Poesy
Part
Stand
Entry
Conversant
Thinking
Public
Conformity
Navigators
World
Knowledge
Dry
Concur
Poor
Coast
Ports
Upon
Thoughtful
Docks
Natural
Currents
Steer
Individualize
Science
Merely
Steers
Bays

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them.
Henry David Thoreau
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That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!
Henry David Thoreau
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Biography, too, is liable to the same objection it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?
Henry David Thoreau
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The virtues of a superior man are like the wind the virtues of a common man are like the grass the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have no time to be in a hurry.
Henry David Thoreau
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Some do not walk at all others walk in the highways a few walk across lots.
Henry David Thoreau
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Spring. March fans it, April christens it, and May puts on its jacket and trousers.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature is goodness crystallized.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
Henry David Thoreau
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I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.
Henry David Thoreau
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Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.
Henry David Thoreau
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Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is one consolation in being sick and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.
Henry David Thoreau
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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau
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No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
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The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.
Henry David Thoreau
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If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Henry David Thoreau
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Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
Henry David Thoreau
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Don't spend your time in drilling soldiers, who may turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for.
Henry David Thoreau