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The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.

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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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Husbandman

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Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.
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The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.
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Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night, dragging an engine at their heels, I'm astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve.
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Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.
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I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it.
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That grand old poem called Winter
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Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. . . . Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
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What means the fact--which is so common, so universal--that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul an infinite confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?
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Do not engage to find things as you think they are.
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Whatever we leave to God, God does and blesses us.
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I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
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I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much what I got by going to Canada was a cold.
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The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.
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We find it difficult to choose our direction because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
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Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.
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I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.
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We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit.... But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry.For picturesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is.
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I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.
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If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.
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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.
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