Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am.
Henry David Thoreau
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Morality
Courses
Course
Evil
Exceptional
Ever
Insignificant
Something
Compared
Good
Deeds
Men
Constantly
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.
Henry David Thoreau
Fire is the most tolerable third party
Henry David Thoreau
In order to die, you must first have lived.
Henry David Thoreau
The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
What the first philosopher taught the last will have to repeat.
Henry David Thoreau
If you will not try, you will go to your grave with your song still inside you.
Henry David Thoreau
We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.
Henry David Thoreau
At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.
Henry David Thoreau
The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.
Henry David Thoreau
I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
Henry David Thoreau
I find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. It is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind onlyreaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. Our conversation is a smooth, and civil, and never-ending speculation merely.
Henry David Thoreau
Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.
Henry David Thoreau
There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.
Henry David Thoreau
What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle in a high moral sense they were not men at all.
Henry David Thoreau
Live free, child of the mist,- and with respect to knowledge we are allchildren of the mist.
Henry David Thoreau
A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Henry David Thoreau
If you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland Light, inTruro.
Henry David Thoreau
True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.
Henry David Thoreau
