3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

The country is an archipelago of lakes,--the lake-country of New England.

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.