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There is no history of how bad became better.
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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
We loiter in winter while it is already spring.
Henry David Thoreau
Live in each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.
Henry David Thoreau
In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson said, 'Henry, what are you doing in there?' Thoreau quietly replied, 'Ralph, what are you doing out there?'
Henry David Thoreau
If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow.
Henry David Thoreau
That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
You speak of poverty and dependence. Who are poor and dependent? Who are rich and independent? When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?
Henry David Thoreau
Write while the heat is in you.
Henry David Thoreau
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
Henry David Thoreau
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
With all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?
Henry David Thoreau
The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.
Henry David Thoreau
We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.
Henry David Thoreau
To say that God has given a man many and great talents frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands.
Henry David Thoreau
My vicinity affords many good walks and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I ever expect to see.
Henry David Thoreau
We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.
Henry David Thoreau
Fame itself is but an epitaph as late, as false, as true.
Henry David Thoreau
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
Henry David Thoreau
As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only the subtlest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky.
Henry David Thoreau
