3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Only the defeated and deserters go to war.

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!

The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect.

What is sour in the house a bracing walk in the woods makes sweet.

Nature has left nothing to the mercy of man.

Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.

We saw men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike.

Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. They were, probably, the best men in their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. If I could but hear the "glad tidings" of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this.