3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

The merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization.

Whatever your sex or position, life is a battle in which you are to show your pluck, and woe be to the coward. Whether passed on a bed of sickness or a tented field, it is ever the same fair play and admits no foolish distinction. Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

There were three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except for a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; second, the few settlers I have named, the only permanent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly Indians, who range over it in their season.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

When the true criminals are running around free, the only honorable place for a decent human being is in prisons.

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.