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A person who chooses to die or to risk death demonstrates that there are values, principles, maxims, that are more valuable to him than is life itself. In short, he places his immortal self above his mortal self. Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

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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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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Naturalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.
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When a man truly commits, the universe will conspire to assure his success.
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The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.
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There is no history of how bad became better.
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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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I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
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. . . I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days. . . .
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We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.
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Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.
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Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.
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I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.
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After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.
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A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
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How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
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...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
Henry David Thoreau
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I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
Henry David Thoreau
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We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.
Henry David Thoreau
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The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
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Do not engage to find things as you think they are.
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There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.
Henry David Thoreau