3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.

For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction.

We make needless ado about capital punishment,--taking lives, when there is no life to take.

Sweep away the clutter of things that complicate our lives.

To see wild life you must go forth at wild season.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions.

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.