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Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

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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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority it is not even a minority then but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
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In the winter, warmth stands for all virtue.
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When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
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When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.
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There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.
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We are older by faith than by experience.
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I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.
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As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend.
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it.
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What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.
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Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.
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The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.
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The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.
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That grand old poem called Winter
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You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.
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I want the flower and fruit of a man that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.
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Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum - many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
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Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them as owls might talk of sunshine,--none of your sunshine!--but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand,--which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.
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Do not read the newspapers.
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I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who have understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,-who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.
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