Quote

As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.

Henry David Thoreau

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Crazy
Town
Pots
Shall
Chinese
Monuments
Heard
Architecture
Monument
High
Fellows
Towers
Made
Admire
Pot
Way
Towns
Hole
Undertook
Think
China
Holes
Kettles
Thinking
Pride
Fellow
Rattle

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Image
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
Henry David Thoreau
Image
But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. Now he falls between two stools.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
I have traveled a good deal in Concord and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The universe expects every man to do his duty in his parallel of latitude.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
We must look a long time before we can see
Henry David Thoreau
Image
When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes-- remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education-- make them hunters.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only the subtlest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it (life), whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'
Henry David Thoreau
Image
The body can feed the body only.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
. . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.
Henry David Thoreau
Image
I knew that the wall was the main thing in Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money.... In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is true.
Henry David Thoreau