Quote

Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two.

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
Way
Higher
Wherever
Forks
Men
Goes
Lots
Separates
Turn
Mood
Multitude
Path
Independence
Multitudes
Though
Indeed
Traveler
Turns
Across
Conformity
Two
Road
Gaps
Travelers
May
Ordinary
Solitary
Fork

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There is no history of how bad became better.
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It seems as if the more youthful and impressible streams can hardly resist the numerous invitations and temptations to leave theirnative beds and run down their neighbors' channels.
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To have made even one person's life a little better, that is to succeed.
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That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
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Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much.
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He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behaviour as well as application.
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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.
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The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.
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I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
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A man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it.
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Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.
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This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.
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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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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.
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Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope.
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While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
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See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
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Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye.
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When I meet a government which says to me, Your money or your life, why should I be in haste to give it my money?
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There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.
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