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One can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contemplation and the observation of nature.
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
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Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Labor
Imagine
Nature
Healthful
Favorable
Contemplation
Employment
Hardly
Observation
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,--shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter acceptas special or general providences but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. Another deluge would disgrace mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.
Henry David Thoreau
If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.
Henry David Thoreau
The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.
Henry David Thoreau
The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.
Henry David Thoreau
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
Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.
Henry David Thoreau
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
Henry David Thoreau
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?
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
They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy evil, that they may no longer have have it to regret.
Henry David Thoreau
All that man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love-to sing, and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.
Henry David Thoreau
In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.
Henry David Thoreau
Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East -- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them -- who were above such trifling.
Henry David Thoreau
For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.
Henry David Thoreau
Write while the heat is in you.
Henry David Thoreau
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]
Henry David Thoreau
No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know.
Henry David Thoreau
Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary.
Henry David Thoreau
With all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?
Henry David Thoreau
