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The greater number of men are merely corporals.

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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Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Conformity
Merely
Number
Numbers
Greater
Men

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Work your vein till it is exhausted, or conducts you to a broader one.
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There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!
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In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.
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We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.
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I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again.
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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.
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I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents.
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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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All that man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love-to sing, and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.
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The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.
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A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government.
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The dry grasses are not dead for me. A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another.
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I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
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We fritter away our energy and creativity . . . we get bogged down in the thick of thin things.
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There is no history of how bad became better.
Henry David Thoreau
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We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.
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To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done,and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements.
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The perception of beauty is a moral test.
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If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
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When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.
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