Quote

If labor mainly, or to any considerable degree, serves the purpose of a police, to keep men out of mischief, it indicates a rottenness at the foundation of our community.

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
Purpose
Mainly
Keep
Serves
Men
Degree
Police
Degrees
Rottenness
Foundation
Indicates
Labor
Considerable
Community
Mischief

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Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
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Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.
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Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.
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The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!
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There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.
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What the first philosopher taught the last will have to repeat.
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To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.
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In order to die, you must first have lived.
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For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?
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I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints.
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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
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So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.
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The country is an archipelago of lakes,--the lake-country of New England.
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Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature -if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you -know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.
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It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.
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It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however, ancient, can be trusted without proof. ... Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
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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.
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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.
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I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.
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Whatever beauty we behold, the more it is distant, serene, and cold, the purer and more durable it is. It is better to warm ourselves with ice than with fire.
Henry David Thoreau