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Some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler.
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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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Best
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.
Henry David Thoreau
Simplicity is the law of Nature for man as well as for flowers. When the tapestry (corolla) of the nuptial bed (calyx) is excessive, luxuriant, it is unproductive. The fertile flowers are single, not double.
Henry David Thoreau
The most alive is the wildest.
Henry David Thoreau
A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.
Henry David Thoreau
Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.
Henry David Thoreau
No doubt another may also think for me but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
Henry David Thoreau
I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.
Henry David Thoreau
Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
Henry David Thoreau
The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?
Henry David Thoreau
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
Henry David Thoreau
Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
Henry David Thoreau
This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.
Henry David Thoreau
In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind.
Henry David Thoreau
The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.
Henry David Thoreau
Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well.
Henry David Thoreau
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Henry David Thoreau
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolizethe whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part.
Henry David Thoreau
I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it.
Henry David Thoreau
