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So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary for what's the hurry?

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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I could lecture on dry oak leaves I could, but who would hear me? If I were to try it on any large audience, I fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. I should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends.
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I suppose that the great questions of Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute, which used to be discussed at Concord, are still unsettled.
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If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.
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I never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud-puddle he comes out honor-bright from behind every storm. Let us then take sides with the sun, seeing we have so much leisure.
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We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
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The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
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Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.
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The greater number of men are merely corporals.
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That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!
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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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I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
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Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
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I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.
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It is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we beginto keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
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Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.
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It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.
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We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
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The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely.
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It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
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