Quote

The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.

Henry David Thoreau

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Stills
Spruce
Still
Shaggy
Swamps
Primitive
Wilderness
Places
Grows
Left

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Image
Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
If you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with all of its applications.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as theevening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
A hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Nature is full of genius, full of divinity.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Perfect sincerity and transparency make a great part of beauty, as in dewdrops, lakes, and diamonds.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Things don't change. We change.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,--if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Every man must walk to the beat of his own drummer.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.
Henry David Thoreau