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We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

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
Crust
Ecology
Reduced
Civilization
Shall
Earth
Nutriment
Gnaw

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Unless the human race perspire more than I do, there is no occasion to live by the sweat of their brow. If men cannot get on without money (the smallest amount will suffice), the truest method of earning it is by working as a laborer at one dollar per day. You are least dependent so I speak as an expert, having used several kinds of labor.
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We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.
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The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids.
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Perfect sincerity and transparency make a great part of beauty, as in dewdrops, lakes, and diamonds.
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Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.
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How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint.
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Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.
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We never conceive the greatness of our fates.
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I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.
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There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!
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Do not read the newspapers.
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By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
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Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.
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If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
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What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?
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The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.
Henry David Thoreau
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Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.
Henry David Thoreau
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When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.
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The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.
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