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I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse. I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meanerthan I could have imagined.... The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.

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
Eyes
Ashamed
Eye
Population
Times
Street
Part
Worse
Better
City
Behold
Like
Streets
Respectable
Thousand
Pigs
Cities
Imagined

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We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
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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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To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.
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Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.
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The state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice and so do the neighborhood and the family. What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.
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When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
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This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.
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The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.
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I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
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To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.
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Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures.
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Hear! hear! screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it.
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The same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.
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The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.
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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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They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.
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If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth
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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
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The sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.
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The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.
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