Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.
Henry David Thoreau
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
President
Committees
Men
Arrangements
Celebrate
Webster
God
Hourly
Integrity
Orator
Expect
Orators
Speech
Celebrating
Somebody
Committee
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
If you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with all of its applications.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.
Henry David Thoreau
As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.
Henry David Thoreau
Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses.
Henry David Thoreau
I am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere,--am slow to move. I hope to hear a response of the oracle first.
Henry David Thoreau
As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.
Henry David Thoreau
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
Let the beautiful laws prevail. Let us not weary ourselves by resisting them.
Henry David Thoreau
The journalists think that they cannot say too much in favor of such improvements in husbandry it is a safe theme, like pietybut as for the beauty of one of these model farms, I would as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it. They are, commonly, places merely where somebody is making money, it may be counterfeiting.
Henry David Thoreau
Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.
Henry David Thoreau
There is such a thing as caste, even in the West but it is comparatively faint it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial.
Henry David Thoreau
You never gain something but that you lose something.
Henry David Thoreau
There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.
Henry David Thoreau
We make needless ado about capital punishment,--taking lives, when there is no life to take.
Henry David Thoreau
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
We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.
Henry David Thoreau
To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.
Henry David Thoreau
