Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Public
Privacy
Menu
Moral
Rare
Parlor
Word
Philosophical
Exceedingly
Time
Familiar
Menus
Morality
Pulpit
Private
Nowadays
Universal
Addresses
Philosophy
Spoken

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Image
Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Endeavor to live the life you have imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
When we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed, and left only vermin in its desolate streets. It is the imagination of poets which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?
Henry David Thoreau
Image
A person who chooses to die or to risk death demonstrates that there are values, principles, maxims, that are more valuable to him than is life itself. In short, he places his immortal self above his mortal self. Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.
Henry David Thoreau