3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of spring.

Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect.

A temple, you know, was anciently "an open place without a roof," whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven; but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode.