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If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.

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
Getting
Regulating
Lasts
Ennui
Last
Troubled
Lives
Mode
Living
According
Best
Indeed
Always
Labor
Never
Learned

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
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Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
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Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
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If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?
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While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognitato them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.
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The perception of beauty is a moral test.
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The forests are held cheap after the white pine has been culled out and the explorers and hunters pray for rain only to clear theatmosphere of smoke.
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I find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. It is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind onlyreaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. Our conversation is a smooth, and civil, and never-ending speculation merely.
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There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
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For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?
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The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
Henry David Thoreau
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A simple woman down in Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveler, supposing that I had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again.
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Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems.
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Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
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It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.
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Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
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My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought - with these I deal.
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Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
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The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle.
Henry David Thoreau