Quote

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

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
Good
Virtue
Virtues
Men
Heaven
Highly
Born
Manners
Else
Bones
Cultivated
Anything
Weakness
Cultivation
May
Civilization
Pathetic
Wells
Whose
Bent
Well
Becomes
Excess

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We are older by faith than by experience.
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Lose the world, get lost in it, and find your soul.
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It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.
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I did not know that we had ever quarreled.
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It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
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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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A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.
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If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.
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I do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.
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The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.
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Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.
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Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.
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Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.
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As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
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What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives.
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That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
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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.
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