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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.

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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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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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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You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity may be you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it.
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The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that hein some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages.
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Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance they make the latitudes and longitudes.
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To speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left.
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Associate reverently, and as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.
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Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
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Where is the unexplored land but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is unexplored land, to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.
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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
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The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
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We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.
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Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
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I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.
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When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?
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Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed it is itself a reform.
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So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance,--the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their good breeding respects only secondary objects.
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Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.
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Eastward I go only by force but westward I go free.
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When any real progress is made, we unlearned and learn anew what we thought we knew before.
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Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treelesswaste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers.
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