3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

We can never have enough of Nature.

How earthy old people become -moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and portents; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like the brutes,' are directed toward Earth. Some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. The world runs to see the panorama, when there is a panorama in the sky which few go to see.

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done,and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements.

How can they expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed time of character.