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The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.

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
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart it being much more sensitive.
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How many things are now at loose ends! Who knows which way the wind will blow tomorrow?
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It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
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The question is whether you can bear freedom. At present the vast majority of men, whether white or black, require the discipline of labor which enslaves them for their own good.
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The most interesting thing which I heard of, in this township of Hull, was an unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed out tome on the side of a distant hill, as I was panting along the shore, though I did not visit it. Perhaps, if I should go through Rome, it would be some spring on the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest.
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Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.
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There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.
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The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
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The culture of the hop ... so analagous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford a theme for future poets.
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What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
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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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That grand old poem called Winter
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I have not earned what I have already enjoyed.
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But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.
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If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.
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Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
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Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!
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Who is old enough to have learned from experience?
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The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not.
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Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses.
Henry David Thoreau