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For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.

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
Sense
Integrity
Self
Losing
Must
Danger
Men
Respect
Responsibility
Freedom
Free
Perfectly
Lost
Otherwise

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Being a teacher is like being in jail once it's on your record, you can never get rid of it.
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Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
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Men have become the tools of their tools.
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A man sits as many risks as he runs.
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The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.
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In the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, I fear, men never attain to.
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Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.
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Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings.
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The heart is forever inexperienced.
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The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences.
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A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for.
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Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.
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Good deeds are no less good because their object is unworthy.
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You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body
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Where is the unexplored land but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is unexplored land, to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.
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So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.
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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.
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We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
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One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then
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Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.
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