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In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Humans
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Men
Institutions
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Outward

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.
Henry David Thoreau
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In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe.
Henry David Thoreau
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Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them - that it was a vain endeavor?
Henry David Thoreau
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The most alive is the wildest.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is the man determines what is said, not the words.
Henry David Thoreau
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We hate the kindness which we understand.
Henry David Thoreau
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Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
Henry David Thoreau
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A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
Henry David Thoreau
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So near along life's stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources.
Henry David Thoreau
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We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. They stand many deep.
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
Henry David Thoreau
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It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent.
Henry David Thoreau
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We loiter in winter while it is already spring.
Henry David Thoreau
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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
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How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?
Henry David Thoreau
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Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.
Henry David Thoreau
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Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray?
Henry David Thoreau
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Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.
Henry David Thoreau
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Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents and there is no Signor Blitz about it.
Henry David Thoreau