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A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.

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
Good
Struck
Silent
Inspirational
Else
Book

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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It [is of] some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life.
Henry David Thoreau
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Perfect sincerity and transparency make a great part of beauty, as in dewdrops, lakes, and diamonds.
Henry David Thoreau
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The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau
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I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all.
Henry David Thoreau
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The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.
Henry David Thoreau
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The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place but man, having discovered fire, boxes up someair in a spacious apartment, and warms that.... Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts.
Henry David Thoreau
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The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
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I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.
Henry David Thoreau
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Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.
Henry David Thoreau
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How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.
Henry David Thoreau
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The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field.
Henry David Thoreau
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The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
Henry David Thoreau
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But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.
Henry David Thoreau
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The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.
Henry David Thoreau
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Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,--why the judge does not dismiss his case,--why the preacher does not dismisshis congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all.
Henry David Thoreau