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There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.

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
Ignorance
Knowledge
Science
Never
Chasm
Chasms
Arches
Span

More quotes by 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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I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.
Henry David Thoreau
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When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
Henry David Thoreau
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Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
Henry David Thoreau
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In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
Henry David Thoreau
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It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps.
Henry David Thoreau
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Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.
Henry David Thoreau
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What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.
Henry David Thoreau
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We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,--at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.
Henry David Thoreau
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If labor mainly, or to any considerable degree, serves the purpose of a police, to keep men out of mischief, it indicates a rottenness at the foundation of our community.
Henry David Thoreau
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The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.
Henry David Thoreau
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We should endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
Henry David Thoreau
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When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.
Henry David Thoreau
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The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The readeris nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.... It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.
Henry David Thoreau
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A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
Henry David Thoreau
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I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.
Henry David Thoreau
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Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
Henry David Thoreau