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No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.
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
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Desire
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Duty
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Lesser
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.
Henry David Thoreau
I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.
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I think of no news to tell you. It is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. The hens steal their nests, and I steal theireggs still, as formerly. This is what I do with the hands. Ah, labor,--it is a divine institution, and conversation with many men and hens.
Henry David Thoreau
I am grateful for what I have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
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Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.
Henry David Thoreau
The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Henry David Thoreau
The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau
Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.
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If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life.
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If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the State itself would hesitate to demand it of him. But the rich man--not to make any invidious comparison--is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.... Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet.
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Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.
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It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.
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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.
Henry David Thoreau
The researcher is more memorable than the researched.
Henry David Thoreau
It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are.
Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.
Henry David Thoreau
Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.
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The only government that I recognize--and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army--is that power thatestablishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.
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By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
