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I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.

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
Beginning
State
Left
Redeem
Nature
Meadows
Earth
Wilderness
States
Wild
Men
Glad
Consequence

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.
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Not till we are completely lost, or turned round, do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.
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We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.
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There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.
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Let us not underrate the value of a fact it will one day flower into a truth.
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I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
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But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.
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I do not judge men by anything they can do. Their greatest deed is the impression they make on me.
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As all curves have reference to their centres or foci, so all beauty of character has reference to the soul, and is a graceful gesture of recognition or waving of the body toward it.
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A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
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A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.
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It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village to make any progress between his door and his gate.
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Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody.
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Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents and there is no Signor Blitz about it.
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Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.
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A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
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How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
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In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.
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The improved means to the unimproved end.
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Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men.
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