3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

I am grateful for what I have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.

As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up.

Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.

What wisdom, what warning can prevail against gladness? There is no law so strong that a little gladness may not transgress.